


If I Ever Leave This Maze Alive

by QuoteIntangible



Series: Labyrinth [2]
Category: Pierce the Veil, Sleeping With Sirens
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, And I Mean Lots and Lots of Crying, Depression, Lots of Crying, M/M, PTSD, Possible medical inaccuracies, aftermath of rape, past thoughts of suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2018-11-13 02:22:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11175012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuoteIntangible/pseuds/QuoteIntangible
Summary: Pierce the Veil may have rescued Sleeping with Sirens from the psychopath's labyrinth, but the real struggle has only just begun





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am so, so sorry this took so long. I'm in one of those ruts where I think everything I write is crap. I must have come up with about five different versions of this chapter and scraped them all, because I hated them all. It happens. They probably weren't that bad, but I couldn't convince my brain of that enough to post the story until now. I still don't not hate it, I just hate it less than I did before and I knew if I didn't force myself to post it, I never would. I've written pieces of other chapters, and I don't hate those. It's just this chapter in particular that I'm having a lot of trouble with. But anyways, the title of this story was derived from the song "If I Ever Leave This World Alive" by Flogging Molly. 
> 
> I also wanted to explain why I ended the last chapter like I did and wrote a sequel. I didn't do it just for the sake of having a sequel. But I didn't want to write just a quick epilogue, and say something like 'and then they all got better, the end.' I really wanted to draw out the recovery and delve into it more. I also didn't want to add these chapters onto the end of the other story, because these chapters have a completely different tone and feel than the other story. That one was all about the rescue and it was faster paced, and this one is all about the recovery and has a much slower pace. 
> 
> Also, I don't like using real non-famous family members in my stories. So the the bands' family members will make appearances, but they are either very loosely based on their real family members, or entirely made up by me. In most cases, I even made up the names for their family members.

There was a body on the floor, a knife still stuck in its throat. Its sightless eyes stared in his direction, mouth agape, lips turned blue, and blood cooling in a puddle around its face.

 _The blood;_ it stained everything. The body, the floor, the walls, his partner’s pale skin.

His hands.

It ran down his arm and dripped onto the floor, mingling with Kellin’s, and adding to the growing puddle around them.

Vigorously, he wiped his hands against his dirty jeans, trying to scrub the sticky substance away. But it stuck to his hands, merging with the very fibers of his skin like it was his own.

He couldn’t take his eyes off of it. 

A hand touched his arm. He  _jerked_ away, and turned his bloodshot eyes on a faceless paramedic. Their lips moved, but Vic heard nothing over the blood rushing in his ears and Kellin’s labored gasps.

The paramedic gestured towards his arm, and this time Vic did not pull away as the person pressed a bandage against the knife wound. They tried to nudge him away from Kellin’s side, but he refused to budge, sticking like a tick to a deer.

Kellin’s eyes fluttered, opening unfocused and confused. Vic’s heart raced as he grasped Kellin’s hand, holding on tighter than a clamp, even as the faceless paramedic tried to push him away again.

But he couldn’t let the paramedic shove him away, for Death was a cruel mistress, all life her slave. No one got to choose their time. No one got to choose when they had to say goodbye to the ones they loved.

He could not be shoved away and miss this opportunity. This might be his only chance to say goodbye. 

Still … he never meant to propose to Kellin in a psychopath’s dungeon. But now that the words were out there, he would not take them back. If these truly were their last moments, if this truly was their goodbye, Vic wanted Kellin to know just how much he loved him.

The faceless paramedics rolled Kellin away, just as Kellin’s eyes slipped shut again, his hand going limp in Vic’s. He forced his shaky legs to hold his weight and follow.

He heard a groan, and his eyes shot to the source: his brother sitting propped against the wall, a paramedic pressing gauze to the cut on his face. Mike gave him a thumbs up and a weak smile, waving him out the door just as the elevator gate slammed shut behind him.

The sun streaming through the lobby windows blinded him when the elevator opened its gate. He threw up his free hand to shield his face and clutched tighter to Kellin’s hand.

He had not felt the sun against his skin for he did not know how long, hadn’t even thought of it until this moment.

It kind of burned.

Vic turned his back to it.

Everyone waited outside for them.

Jaime and Tony stood with SWS’s tour manager, who was hysterically sobbing, talking to a few police officers. Jack sat next to the wheel of a police cruiser, his dirty bruised cheek pressed against the metal, and Justin sat in the back of the cruiser. Both had thermal blankets clutched tightly around their shoulders. Though weak and exhausted, they staggered to their feet and hobbled towards the gurney, their expressions turned distraught as the paramedics and Vic rushed by with Kellin.

Vic propelled himself with energy he didn’t know he had left into the back of the ambulance. Though the warmth of the sun helped chase away the last vestiges of cold that had seeped into his very bones, he was glad when the ambulance doors slammed shut behind him, hiding him away from the sun once more.

The faceless paramedic tapped on his arm again, and he jerked his head in their direction. Their lips moved, but Vic shook his head. He could not hear what they were saying, nor did he want to try. Even the siren of the ambulance faded into the background of his beating heart and rushing blood.

Everything had blurred, colors bleeding together; the movement of the paramedics as they worked on Kellin seeming as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. The bodies around him were faceless, the ambulance’s instruments nothing more than blobs. In that moment, the only concrete thing was Kellin’s hands in his own.

He squeezed Kellin’s hand tighter as the doors to the ambulance were thrown open, the sun blinding him once again. He struggled to keep up with the gurney as his partner was rushed inside.

A hand on his chest stopped him cold in his tracks, and Kellin’s hand, the only thing keeping him grounded and sane, slipped from his grasp.

All at once, reality slammed into place. The distorted sound clarified – the shrill cry of a toddler in the waiting room, the indistinct chatter of a workplace, the beeps of various instruments, and the low buzz of electricity. He tore his gaze away from Kellin disappearing behind double doors to the hand on his chest, up to the harried face of the male nurse that had stopped him.

“Sir, please come with me this –”

“No,” Vic frantically said, shaking his head vigorously. “I have to go with him,” he said gesturing towards where they’d taken Kellin, and reaching out for his partner like a lost child.

“You can’t go back there. We have to take care of your arm first,” the nurse said.

“No,” Vic insisted, and tried to walk around the nurse, only to be stopped by a second female nurse. “Get out of my way,” he said. Why did these people not understand that he  _needed_ to be with Kellin? He could be … Kellin could be dying, and these two were keeping them apart. Vic had to be there, he  _needed_  to be there, just in case …

No one should ever have to die alone, even if they didn’t know it.

“Vic!” he heard a familiar voice say, and he spun around as a familiar face jogged towards him. “Oh my God, what happened to your arm?”

“I got stabbed,” he mumbled, dismissing the throbbing pain in his arm as Nick halted next to him. It was not important right now.  “Why are you here?”

“I volunteered to ride in with Gabe. Everyone else wanted to wait to see if you and Kellin were okay.”

“Okay,” he said slowly, his words slightly slurred. “I need to …” he said, and stopped, feeling his head spin as his vision momentarily stuttered.

“Woah there,” Nick said, both of his hands suddenly on Vic’s shoulders steadying him. “You with us still?”

“I’m fine,” he mumbled, and shook his head, trying to rid himself of the fuzzy feeling that had taken over. “Kellin –”

“Is in good hands,” Nick said. “You need to get yourself taken care of.”

“No,” Vic said, shaking his head carefully. He felt nauseous and dizzy. “No. Kellin, they took him away. I need to be with him, but they keep stopping me. I need to –”

“Hey, hey, breathe,” Nick said, the hands on his shoulders squeezing lightly. “You’re bleeding all over the floor. You can't go back there like that,” Nick said.

Nick was right. Vic didn’t want him to be right, but he knew he couldn't just go around bleeding over everything, and that sooner or later the blood loss would knock him off his feet. “I don’t want him to be alone,” Vic mumbled, unwilling to concede just yet.

Nick’s eyebrows knitted in confusion, before understanding dawned on him. “It’ll be okay,” Nick said.

“You can’t know that,” Vic murmured.

“I … You're right, I don’t,” Nick said, his crestfallen face revealing his heartbreak. “But you’re not going to be any good to Kellin if you pass out from blood loss, okay? You need to get your wound looked at first. Then these nice nurses will let you be with Kellin. The nurses promise to make it quick.”

“Okay,” he conceded, though not lightly. “You promise this won’t take long, right?” he mumbled somewhere in the direction of the two nurses who were starting to look more like blobs than people.

The female nurse gave a tight smile and nodded curtly.

For the first time since Kellin disappeared, Vic felt himself relax.

*

 _Quick, my ass,_ Vic thought as he forced his heavy eyelids open. Nothing was ever quick in a hospital.

Nothing, except death.

Moonlight filtered through the cracks of the blinds, and the lights in his hospital room had been dimmed. There was an IV in his arm, and it must have held some pretty strong pain killers because his shoulder was completely numb, and the panic he had been feeling before had faded to the background, though it still _itched_ under his skin. A large white bandage covered his entire shoulder down to his mid upper arm and he had no idea what they had done to his arm, nor had he any clue how he ended up in this bed.

“He’s awake, do you want to talk to him?” he heard his brother say, as Mike strode into the room, a cellphone pressed against his face. There was a bandage taped above Mike’s eye, but to Vic’s relief he seemed relatively okay. “It’s Mom. She wants to talk to you,” Mike said, handing him the phone.

“What?” he croaked into the phone, his throat dry and raspy. His mouth tasted like iron and the bitter taste of medicine.  “Mom?”

“Oh, my sweet baby. Mike said you were stabbed. Are you okay?” his mother asked, sounding frantic and on the verge of tears.

“Uh,” he said, his brain still trying to catch up to what was happening. “What they’d do to my shoulder?” he asked his brother.

“Surgery. Something about fixing the muscle maybe. I don’t know. You’re gonna be fine after some physical therapy.”

“Mike says I’m fine,” Vic parroted into the phone, trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes and force his brain awake. He never did well on anesthetics.

It’s quiet for a moment, and he thought he heard his mother crying on the other end of the phone. “What were you thinking, Victor?” she asked in small, chastising tone.

When he made the decision to go after Kellin, he hadn’t quite thought through how it would affect the other people in his life, those that loved him and the fans of PTV. He never thought of what would happen to them if he just disappeared. He never thought about the people that would be people sitting at home, waiting for a phone call that would never come.

Just like he had.

But it wouldn’t have changed his decision even if he had. He would have chased after Kellin until his dying breath no matter the consequences. “I had to go after him, Mom,” he said, swallowing a sob. “I couldn’t just … I couldn’t ….”

“I know, baby,” she said and sighed. He knew she didn’t agree with his decision necessarily, but at the very least she understood why. “Your father and I will be there soon.”

“I can –”

“Mike has already purchased the plane tickets for us.”

“You guys don’t have to come, I’m fine,” he insisted, though his voice cracked.

“Kellin is family, too, sweetheart,” his mother said. Vic felt his heart swell with the love his family had for his boyfriend. “And I know you. I know you’re not leaving that hospital without him. Your father and I want to be there, for both of you.”

“Okay,” he says, feeling the pressure behind his eyelids and forcing it back. He’d always been a bit of a Momma’s boy. When he was little, his mother was always the one who made him feel better when the other kids bullied him at school. He told her everything, even when he lost his virginity and who to. She was the first person he ever told that he was bisexual. And she was the first person he told that he wanted to marry Kellin. He needed his mother here, more than he wanted to admit. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, and handed the phone back to Mike. “Thanks for sticking Mom on me when I just woke up,” he said, with a wry laugh to indicate he was only joking. But his laugh turned into a cough because of how dry his mouth was.

“Sorry,” Mike said, pouring him a glass of water from the bottle in his hand. “I told her you weren’t awake yet, and that you were going to be fine, but you know how Mom is,” Mike said with a shrug, handing Vic the plastic cup. “How do you feel?”

Vic took a small sip of the lukewarm water, letting it soothe his parched throat for what felt like the first time in days, and probably was. He shrugged his shoulder and felt a sharp pain in his arm. “I don’t know,” he settled on. It was hard to pinpoint the vortex of feelings thrashing around inside of him barely held in-check by his own will and the medicine still coursing through his veins.

“Yeah,” Mike said, looking down at the phone he was fiddling with in his hands.

“Are _you_ okay?” Vic asked.

“Eh, a few stitches, a little bit of dehydration, but nothing I’ve never experienced before,” Mike said. They both knew he was trying to downplay it, though. This was unlike anything they had ever been through before, and neither were quite sure how to handle it. 

“How’s everyone else?” Vic asked the question he dreaded the answer to most.

“They'll be okay, for the most part. Jaime and Tony were a little dehydrated, but they’re fine. They got a hotel room and went there to get some sleep. Nick’ll need some PT on his shoulder, and they’re keeping him overnight, but physically he’ll be fine in no time. Justin’s fingernails will take a while to grow back, and they’re infected, but the doctors say he’ll be fine, too. Jack’s gonna need surgery on his arm when the swelling goes down, it’s pretty fucked up. And Gabe is still in surgery.”

“What about Kellin?” Vic quietly asked, rubbing the starch white material of the blanket thrown over his knees between his fingers.

“We haven’t heard anything yet,” Mike said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know. Still,” Mike said, grasping the hand rubbing at the blanket, causing Vic to look up at him. “I’m sorry.”

Vic nodded in understanding. “Has anyone called his parents and his sister?”

“Yeah. The police did. His family are on their way already,” Mike said, drumming the fingers of his free hand on his legs, something Vic knew he only did when he was nervous.

“That’s good,” Vic said, curling his hand around his brother’s. “When can I get out of here?”

“Soon, I think. They were just waiting for you to wake up. They said you could use the shower in this room to get clean as long as you don’t get your stitches wet, and then a nurse will get your discharge papers,” Mike said, his gaze flickering towards the door.

“Okay, what is it? What aren’t you telling me?” Vic said.

Mike sighed heavily. “I couldn’t hold them off. They said it can’t wait.”

“What can’t?”

“The police. They want to ask you about what happened.”

Vic felt his chest tighten as his eyes followed his brother’s gaze to the door where two shadowy figures stood.

He hadn’t thought about until that moment, but …

Vic had taken a life.

And it was time to fess up.

*

“I did it. I killed him,” Vic blurted out after his brother left the room. He hadn’t even given the officers a chance to sit down yet.

He recognized the two of them. They were the ones assigned the case when Kellin went missing. He had been there with them when they interrogated the hotel manager.

They were a useless bunch. Vic didn’t trust them.

“Relax, Mr. Fuentes,” the older female cop - Officer Hardy, he thought her name might have been – said, and gave what he assumed was supposed to be a reassuring smile. “This is just a formality.”

Vic balled his shaking hand into a fist and hid it under the blanket still draped over his knees. “I killed him,” he repeated in a shaky voice. He felt dizzy and light headed, and took a deep breath to calm his wildly beating heart. “I stabbed him in the throat.”

“Why don’t we start at the beginning,” the young male officer said, his eyes flicking towards his partner’s.

Vic narrowed his eyes at the young man whose name he did not remember, nor did he care to. This was the cop, after all, who had told him their chances of finding Kellin were slim to none and that Vic should 'move on' like it was that easy. And yet, somehow four dudes in a band with no police, or military, or survival training whatsoever, managed to survive a psychopath’s labyrinth and save his boyfriend’s band, while the cops had done nothing at all, but show up after the fact.

After Vic had killed a man.

The young cop glared back at him, despite the disapproving look from his partner, so Vic started from the beginning, told them everything from how he acquired the blue prints, to the moment he woke up in the basement, to the final fight.

“How did you get the knife?” the male cop asked, doubt coloring his voice that a tiny man like Vic could take down a killer twice his size.

“He just left it behind. He was about to kill me with it,” Vic admitted. “He stabbed me in the arm and tried to stab me again, but Kellin … Kellin shot him,” he said, his voice choking up on his partner’s name. “Kellin had crawled his way to the gun, and shot him to save my life,” Vic said, stressing that last part. “He dropped the knife when he got shot, but … But then he just got up, like he hadn’t been shot at all. He tried to attack Kellin and Kellin tried to shoot him again, but the gun jammed,” Vic said, feeling his throat close up again. He remembered the look on Kellin’s face as the man advanced, the terror written plainly on his face. He remembered the way his gaze briefly flickered towards Vic’s before the terror melted into acceptance. “He was going to hurt Kellin again, so I grabbed the knife and I stabbed him.”

The male cop learned forward in his seat and opened his big fat mouth again, but Officer Hardy put her hand on his chest. “I think that’s all, Mr. Feuntes,” she said. “Considering all the evidence we’ve gathered against this man, I doubt you’ll be hearing any more from us. If you have any questions, feel free to call,” she said, handing over a business card, and dragging her partner out of the room.

It was over. He had been absolved of guilt by the law, and yet all he felt was a strange sort of emptiness take residence in his chest.

It wasn’t so much that he had blood on his hands that unsettled him the most.

It was that he didn’t feel bothered by it all.

*

Vic remembered being 15-years-old and sitting in a room much like the one he was in now, waiting for news on his grandfather. He’d had a stroke, and because too much time had passed between the stroke and his arrival at the hospital, their treatment options were limited.

Vic remembered sleeping curled up in a hospital chair next to his grandfather’s bed, watching his grandfather get sicker and sicker with every tick of the clock.

He and his family sat by his grandfather’s bed for days, waiting in vain for him to regain consciousness.

They left for just a half hour to get food, but in those 30 measly minutes they had been gone, his grandfather passed away.

His parents threw around words like ‘he chose to leave while we were gone so we wouldn’t have to witness it.’ Vic was never quite sure how much of that he really believed.

His grandfather had been the first person close to him that he had lost. 

But only the first of many. 

It never got easier. And the wait in the hospital for news never got less excruciating. It was even harder, he found, when the person he was waiting to hear the fate of was the love of his life, the person he was meant to spend the rest of his life with, and the one person who just might not make it through the night.

He felt Mike’s arm subconsciously tighten around his waist. Somehow his brother had managed to fall asleep, his tall frame impossibly stretched out on the uncomfortable plastic chairs, his head pillowed in Vic’s laps.

After a nurse strapped him into a sling and handed him his discharge papers, Vic had tried to convince his brother to head to the same hotel as Jaime and Tony to get some real sleep, but his brother wouldn’t hear of it.

He let his hand rest on his brother’s head, grateful for his presence even if Mike was fast asleep.

Nick had tried to join them, too, dragged his IV pole from the room he shared with Jack to the waiting room in nothing but a hospital gown. The nurses managed to wrestle him back to his room only after Vic promised they would share any news on Gabe or Kellin as soon as they had any.

But the night dragged on, and still there was no news. And though Vic had not slept in days, he was wide awake, too afraid to fall asleep.

“Mr. Fuentes?” he heard an unfamiliar voice finally say just as the sun had started to peak through the front doors. He carefully extracted himself from his brother, gently resting Mike’s head on the chair, before making his way over to the doctor. ~~~~

“I'm Dr. Caido,” the middle-aged man with grey peppered in his brown hair greeted. He had a friendly smile as he offered Vic his hand to shake, but even the warmth of his smile could not chase away the cold, grim feeling that had settled inside of Vic. His smile had to be a good sign, though, right? The doctor wouldn’t smile at him like that if Kellin was …

“Is this about Kellin?” he asked, even as he felt the fear and dread grow within him. “How is he?”

The doctor’s smile faltered.

Vic wiped his sweaty palms on the hospital scrubs the nurse had lent him after his shower.

“I will be quite frank with you, Mr. Quinn’s condition is very serious,” the doctor said. “Do you know what sepsis is?”

Vic felt the pressure build behind his eyes again, and his bit his lip to swallow a sob. He shook his head no to the doctor’s question.

“Mr. Quinn received many lacerations to his back. A few of them became infected, and because they were not treated right away, the infection spread to his blood stream. Sepsis is what happens when the body’s immune system goes into overdrive trying to fight the infection and ends up causing inflammation throughout the entire body. It is a life-threatening illness, and your partner’s case is quite severe. We’ve placed him in the ICU and are administering heavy duty antibiotics. However, the infection is taking a huge toll on his body, and putting a lot of pressure on his organs. If he doesn’t respond to the antibiotics soon, we’ve already received permission from his parents to put him in an induced coma and put him on life support. I know that sounds scary to you right now, but it will help take the pressure off his lungs and other organs to help him fight the infection better.”

The doctor paused, and Vic nodded to show he understood. He wasn’t sure he could stop himself from crying if he opened his mouth to respond.

“Your partner had several broken ribs, one of which was fractured and putting pressure on his lung, which is why Mr. Quinn was having so much trouble breathing when we first brought him in. Fortunately, though, it didn’t puncture the lung,” the doctor said, and Vic nodded again.

The doctor looked around the hallway, before pulling Vic to the side. Before he could speak again, Vic already knew exactly what was going to come out of his mouth next. But he couldn’t stop the way his heart pounded in his chest, or the way the tears started rolling down his cheeks. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” the doctor said, “but your partner was sexually assaulted. The rape kit came back negative for semen, but there was some tearing. We’ve done a complete STD panel, all of which came back negative, but we have started him on anti-virals as a precaution, and he will need to get retested for HIV in a few months.”

“Is he … Is he going to be okay then?” he asked. If the doctor wanted him retested in a few months, that meant he was going to survive, right? That meant there was a chance he was going to be okay, right?

“I’m not going to lie to you, Mr. Fuentes, sepsis is a very severe medical condition and the infection that in Mr. Quinn’s case went untreated for a number of days. We may not have caught it in time. There is a chance he won’t recover. I’m sorry.”

“Can I see him?” Vic asked, wiping the tears from his face, though it was in vain as they continued to fall.

“Of course. I’ll send a nurse down to take you up there.”

“Thank you, Dr. Caido,” Vic said. He took in a deep stuttering breath as he tried to compose himself before waking up Mike, but his tears refused to stop falling and he felt himself unable to force back a sob.

He tensed as he felt arms wrap around him, but immediately relaxed into Mike’s hug.

“Did you …?”

“I heard everything. I’m so sorry, Vic.”

“Will you …?”

“Yeah, I tell the others,” Mike said, letting Vic pull away as the nurse arrived to take him to the ICU. “I wish I could tell you everything was going to be all right.”

“Yeah. Me, too,” Vic said, viciously rubbing at his eyes again.

“Whatever happens, I’m right here.”

“I know,” he said.

And though his brother’s support meant the world to him, had always meant the world to him, and gotten through some of the roughest points in his life, right now, with Kellin’s life on the line, it didn’t feel like this time it would be enough.

*

The nurse led him to a curtained off corner of the ICU. For a moment, Vic just stood there, clasping the thin material of the curtain tightly between his fingers. For a moment, he was paralyzed.

And then slowly, he drew the curtain back.

Kellin was propped up on his side by a wedge, various IV’s sticking from his arm, his eyes closed, and lips slightly parted. Though his cheeks were flushed and bruised, his skin was gray; almost the same color as the body sitting on the dungeon floor. The body that Vic had made.

He collapsed into the chair placed next to the bed and clasped Kellin’s cold hand, pressing it to his forehead. He let himself be soothed by the beat of Kellin’s heart on the monitor and the rise and fall of his chest.

As long as Kellin still lived, so did Vic’s heart.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe how long this chapter took me. T-T I'm so sorry. It's not a lack of desire, but more like the inability to find the right words to say. I'm hoping for smoother sailing from now on.

With a sick sense of dread and the feeling like there was a monster chewing, clawing, _scratching_ its way free from his stomach, Nick jerked awake. The first thing he felt was an unfamiliar scratchy blanket draped over his mostly exposed skin. The air smelled like cleaning products, and just underneath, something acrid and metallic.

_The smell of death._

He felt the warmth of a body sitting next to him, and heard the whisper of movement _swoosh_ the air gently around him.

Despite the pounding of his heart, Nick took a slow, steady breath, before twisting around quickly and smacking the intruder with his hand.

There was a sharp, familiar yelp as the person hit the floor with a thud.

“It’s me, Mike,” the person said. “You’re in the hospital. You’re safe.”

A sharp stab of bitterness and annoyance towards Mike flared to life in his chest. Nick stamped it out, and poured water over the embers of his irritation.

It was not _Mike’s_ fault. He was only trying to help.

Nick rubbed the fogginess of sleep and heavy sedatives from his eyes and saw Mike sitting on the ground, his arm held up passively, non-threateningly.

“Sorry,” Nick rasped, sweeping away the embers of irritation before they could flare to life once again.

“It’s okay. I get it,” Mike said, pushing himself off the floor and back into the chair.

_You don’t get it at all,_ flashed through his brain like a wildfire. He ignored the thought, and shoved it in the box in his brain regulated for such negative, bitter, unnecessary thoughts. The kind of thoughts that never helped anyone.

“If you’re here, does that mean you have news on Gabe and Kellin?” Jack’s scratchy voice, still thick with sleep and the same sedatives pouring through Nick, asked from the bed on the other side of the room.

“I do,” Mike said evenly, but the way his shoulders slumped as he said it alerted Nick that it was not good news at all.

“Just … just tell us, please,” Jack said in a small voice when Mike hesitated to answer.

“Gabe just got out of surgery a little while ago. The docs say he’s critical, but stable, and that his prognosis looks good. But he’s in the ICU for now, and the doctors say there’s always a chance of infection,” Mike cut off with a heavy sigh, his gaze finding its way to the floor.

Nick felt his heart sink lower and lower, as if the monster still clawing at his stomach was dragging his heart down, trying to _rip_ it from his chest to tear and claw it apart. “What about Kellin?” he asked.

“He’s in the ICU, too, but his condition is pretty serious. They’re not sure if he’s going to make. I’m sorry,” Mike said.

He heard Jack gasp, and saw him turn his face away from them.

“Can I … Can I ask why they think that?” Nick asked, chocking on his own words.

Mike eyed him critically. “He’s got something called sepsis,” Mike finally answered. “Basically, the cuts on his back were infected so badly that the infection spread to his blood stream. He’s very ill. The doctor said they’ll have to put him on life support if he doesn’t start responding to the antibiotics soon.”

Nick felt his chest tighten as he nodded, and nodded, and nodded along with Mike’s words before the monster in stomach broke through, causing a burst of guilt and sorrow to flood through him. He buried his face in hands. He knew, as soon as he saw Kellin’s back for the first time, he knew there was a chance this might happen, a chance Kellin might not make it.

But to have his suspicions confirmed made it hurt worse.

“I tried so hard to keep those cuts clean,” he murmured into his hands to himself, almost forgetting he wasn’t alone.

“This isn’t your fault,” Mike said.

“That bastard probably never cleaned that whip once,” Jack said, his voice thick and scratchy, as he wiped his good hand across his nose. Mike’s face blanched as realization dawned on him what Jack meant. “There was nothing more you could have done.”

_I could have gotten us out of there sooner,_ Nick thought. If he’d just paid more attention. If he had just …

“You’re right,” he said, forcing a smile for Mike’s sake. “When can I get out of here, do you know?”

*

They shoved him into some spare scrubs, strapped his arm in a sling, and set him free.

“Give your shoulder six weeks or so to heal and keep an eye out for infection in those cuts,” the nurse cheerfully said as she handed him his discharge papers to sign. “You’ll need to start PT on your shoulder in about four weeks. Your primary care physician should be able to recommend you one where you live.”

He felt the bitterness and irritation surge to life again at her bright white smile. His friends were seriously injured, two possibly dying. They’d been beaten, starved, and traumatized. Everything was awful and nothing would ever be okay again. Nothing would ever be the same, and this woman’s cheery disposition was not helpful in the least.

But it wasn’t _her_ fault. She was just doing her job and Nick could not blame her for that.

But still, a small part of him locked away in the negative box in his brain felt some sense of satisfaction when the nurse’s smile faltered when he said, “I want to see my friends in the ICU.”

“Of course,” she said, pasting on her excessive smile once more. He made a face at her when she turned her head away towards a noise in the hallway.

“I can take him up there,” Mike interjected before the nurse could say anything more. “I know the way,” he quietly added.

“Um, okay,” the nurse said, her smile faltering once more to the satisfaction of the monster still taking residence in his stomach.

 Mike put a hand on his shoulder, leading Nick from the room. He felt his skin crawl, shivers emanating from the contact of Mike’s hand on his skin. His muscles tightened, stomach clenching at the familiar touch.

“Can you not do that,” he said softly to lessen the blow.

“Sorry,” Mike said, looking away guiltily. “It’s up a couple floors this way.” 

Nick kept apace with Mike down the hallway, in the elevator up, and down the twists and turns of the next floor until the ICU sign loomed before them like red eyes glowing in the darkness. He fell behind then, steps subconsciously slowing more and more until his feet stopped, seemingly glued to the floor just before the door to his friends.

“Normally they don’t allow visitors in the ICU like this. But it’s a small hospital, and Gabe and Kellin are the only ones in there, so they’ve made an exception for us,” Mike said. He stepped through the door, but stopped and turned back when he realized Nick was no longer following him. “Hey, you okay?”

“Not really,” Nick said with a dry, humorless laugh.

“Sorry,” Mike said again, slumping his shoulders and scuffing his shoes against the floor. “I didn’t mean –”

“I know,” Nick cut him off.

“You don’t have to do this.”

Nick wiped furiously at his wet eyes. “Yes I do,” he said, finally stepping through the door. “Just, wait here, please?”

Mike nodded as Nick passed him.

There were six beds in the ICU, all empty and with the curtains open, except for the two in the back left corner whose plain white curtains were drawn tightly shut around them. It was eerily quiet in this room, the only sound the beat of two heart monitors and the hiss of equipment.

His steps faltered as he strode forward. Nick held his breath as he pulled the first curtain back slightly and peeked at the occupant of the bed.

With the blood and dirt cleaned off his face, Gabe looked even worse than he did in the dungeon. His skin was pale and tinged an awful grey, body completely still, except for the mechanical rise and fall of his chest aided by the ventilator shoved down his throat.

He touched the hand placed delicately along Gabe’s side.

It was cold, ice cold, as if no blood pumped to it at all.

  
“Nick,” he heard a tired voice rasp. He spun around on his heels, nearly losing his balance. Through a small gap in the next curtain he could just make out Vic sitting hunched over what must be Kellin’s bed.

Nick pulled the curtain back farther, feeling his chest clench tighten further and further until it almost hurt to breathe.

Just like Gabe, Kellin looked worse than he did in their prison. He was propped up on his side, facing away from Nick towards Vic. Through the slit in Kellin’s hospital gown, Nick could see the white bandages wrapped around Kellin’s chest and back, lined with red and in some spots yellow where the infected cuts were. As he got closer, he saw Kellin’s skin was the same color as Gabe, a pasty white tinged grey, except his cheeks were flushed with fever. 

Kellin did not have a ventilator, but at any moment he knew that could change. At any moment, for no reason at all, Kellin could just …

Nick had done a pretty damn good job of holding it together until that point. But then he saw Vic’s hand clasped around Kellin’s lifeless hand, and the exhaustion and despair lining his cousin’s eyes. The seams he’d stitched around himself to hold himself, and his band, together through this whole ordeal started unraveling, tearing apart, exposing the raw, gaping wounds gouged deep under his skin. The tears fell faster than he could wipe them away.

“Would you like a moment alone?” Vic asked, startling Nick.

His chest felt too tight now. He struggled to take a breath.

Vic shouldn’t have to leave. This was his boyfriend that was dying, the man that should be Vic’s fiancé.

And it wasn’t Mike’s fault, it wasn’t the nurses fault, it wasn’t Vic’s fault … it was _Nick’s_ fault.

It was Nick’s fault Kellin and Gabe might be dying.

It was _his_ fault Vic might never get to propose to Kellin.

And now it was _Nick’s_ fault Vic had to leave his boyfriend’s side when they needed each other the most.

“You don’t –” he started, even though he really needed a moment alone.

“Hey, it’s okay. I’ll go get some coffee with Mike in the cafeteria,” Vic said, as he passed by.

“And food,” Mike insisted, putting an arm around Vic’s shoulder and leading him away from Kellin’s side.

_You wouldn’t be so understanding if you knew what I couldn’t do in that dungeon,_ Nick thought, watching Vic shut the door to the ICU behind him.

If their situations were reversed, and it was his wife Jenna lying in the same position as Kellin while Vic was relatively unharmed, he would have hated Vic. No matter what anyone told him about what happened, a small part of him would always have hated Vic, would always have blamed him for coming home relatively unscathed when his wife didn’t.

And he wouldn’t fault Vic if he chose to do the same, didn’t understand why Vic hadn’t already. Nick did not deserve their forgiveness.

He fell to his knees between Gabe and Kellin. Their beds were pushed close enough together that he could reach out and touch both of them at the same time.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, letting his tears fall unobstructed to the white tile floor that felt too much like the room Kellin was held in, the room Kellin was raped in, the room his friends were nearly beaten to death in.

The room all of them almost lost their life in.  

“Please, please don’t die,” Nick begged, squeezing his grip around Gabe’s hand and Kellin’s arm. He would never be in another band again if he lost either of them. He would never sing again. He would never play guitar. He would never make music. He would never move on. “I can’t lose either of you. Please. Please don’t go,” Nick pleaded.

But there was no response, not even a blip in their heart monitors. And there may never be one ever again.

*

Jack wasn’t what anyone would _ever_ accuse of being smart.

He failed 8th grade, was passed along through high school because no one wanted to deal with him, and still somehow never made it past 11th grade. He dropped out at 17 to tour with his first band, Broadway, and because of the subsequent success of Sleeping With Sirens, never bothered to get his GED. Though it wasn’t uncommon in the rock scene, Jack is what many assholes would call ‘uneducated.’

It never used to bother him, his lack of education, even if the occasional joke was made at his expense about his lack of any sort of arbitrary piece of paper declaring him a member of the graduated society. He’d laugh along, brush it off, and give his own jibe back to whoever poked fun of him.

But that was because he knew he had something to fall back on. He knew that while he could never measure up to the greats, like Slash or Django Reinhardt, he was a damn good guitarist that could shred like a badass and play almost whatever piece of music was put in front of him. And though he would never be one to write lyrics, not like Kellin or Nick, was nowhere _near_ in touch with his feelings for that, he could still write a killer melody and a killer rift.

Jack had a gift for guitar, which is why Kellin recruited _him specifically,_ snatched him straight from the jaws of Broadway because of how impressed he was with Jack’s skill. But even if he didn’t have that gift, he had a skill that was in high demand in the music world.

So he never worried about not finishing high school. He never worried about not having a degree or a GED or anything else to fall back on, because he was damn good at what he did.

But that all changed when the orthopedic surgeon said, “The blood flow has been cut off to your hand for a long time. There’s also a chance of nerve damage. We can perform the surgery today, but there’s no guarantee you’ll ever regain feeling in your hand.” The doctor paused, waiting for an indication of understanding from Jack.

He jerkily nodded his head, the closest he could come in that moment to letting the doctor know he understand.

“The nurse will be in shortly to prep you for surgery,” the doctor added with a sympathetic look.

Jack felt his entire world break apart, like a meteor in the atmosphere that then crashes into the ground into a million irreparable pieces. But he pasted on a cheesy grin, and said, “Thanks, Doc.”

Jack released a shaky breath as the doctor left, and subconsciously pulled his broken arm to his chest.

No feeling meant no movement. No movement meant he couldn’t play guitar. And without guitar …

Was there a Jack still?

Jack loved his father, but was never really close to him. His father was in the army and almost always away from home. And his mother was a musician who mostly played local shows, but occasionally traveled leaving Jack in the care of his grandparents for a large portion of his childhood. 

His grandfather was a musician, much like his mother and himself. At four-years-old, his grandfather handed Jack his first guitar and taught him everything there was to know about playing it.

“You have a gift,” his grandfather would say. “Don’t waste it.”

Jack took those words to heart, and once he got his own guitar he practiced every day for 10 years and learned everything there was to know about making music, until he joined Broadway.

Guitar was his entire life, it defined _who he was_ as a person.

And he didn’t know how to live without it.

“Good news?” a voice asked from the hallway, startling Jack from his depressing musings.

“I’ll be okay,” Jack evaded, giving Nick the same cheesy grin he gave the doctor. “I thought you were sprung from this place?”

“I was,” Nick said, hovering at the doorway like a nervous kindergartner on his first day of school. “But I wanted to visit Gabe and Kellin before I head to a hotel.”

He noticed for the first time Nick’s red-rimmed eyes, and swollen puffy cheeks.

“How do they look?”

“Worse than yesterday,” Nick said. “But I don’t know for sure, I’m not a doctor,” he mumbled, eyes falling to the floor.

“Are you gonna head home soon?”  he asked. Jack wanted to flee this wretched place as quickly as possible. He knew when … if they ever toured again, the entire band would not step within 100 miles of this evil place, probably would never even come back to the state. They would never be able to come here without remembering what had happened in that dungeon, how close they had all come to losing their lives, and how close they still could come to losing one of their best friends.

“No,” Nick said, surprising Jack. “I’m want to stick around until I know for sure whether or not Gabe and Kellin are going to be okay. _If_ they’re going to be okay,” Nick said, murmuring the last part so softly Jack almost missed it.

Jack bit the inside of his cheek, grinding the flesh in between his molars. What more could he say to Nick, something sincere, but trite and trivial? Jack knew who the blame really fell on, and it wasn’t any of them. There was nothing any of them could have done to change what had happened, and if even if they could have done something more, something different, they couldn’t go back and change it now.

It happened.

And there was nothing any of them could do to change that.

But he didn’t know how to make Nick understand that when he barely understood it himself.

Why had this happened? Why them?

There would never be a good answer to that. And spreading around blame like seeds in a field wouldn’t make anyone feel better, wouldn’t fix anything, and definitely could not change what happened. It was a fruitless venture.

“I think you have a visitor,” Nick said, shutting him down before Jack could think of something to say. 

Nick shuffled to the side of the door, letting a familiar face squeeze into the room.

“Mom!” Jack said, feeling his chest tighten as he saw the concerned face of his mother for the first time in months.

Jack hadn’t cried once in the hotel.

He didn’t cry when they first woke up there, didn’t cry even when escape seemed impossible. His eyes remained dry when they woke up chained to the wall, and though his emotions were in turmoil, no tears fell from his eyes when he watched his friends get nearly beaten to death before his eyes. He didn’t even cry when he was being tortured, nor when he thought Kellin had been killed, though he chalked that up to shock and denial more than anything else. He’d come close to crying when Mike broke the news about Gabe and Kellin, but something had held him back.

But when his mother walked through the door with tears in her eyes and a stupid stuffed bear clutched tightly in her hands, Jack lost it.

Everything crashed into him at once: he’d been tortured by a sick sadist for nothing more than _pleasure._ The single most important thing in his life outside of his friends and family, his guitar, might be taken away from for good, and he might just lose his identity in the process. He nearly lost his bandmates, his _family,_ could still lose two of them.

All for _nothing._

And while the horror of what had happened to them had always been there, lurking in the back of his mind, in that moment, it finally sunk in, like bodies in quick sand.

And in that moment, at his most vulnerable, Jack hugged his mother tightly around the waist, buried his head in her shoulder, and cried for the first time since he was a young child.

His mother rocked him as he sobbed, and while it did not soothe the pains lurking around his mind and heart, it brought a sense of comfort that only a mother’s love could bring.

“I got you this bear,” she said after he pulled away. She used the bear’s paws to wipe away the tear tracks on his face.

Jack chuckled as he took the bear from her and set in his lap.

“Where’s Dad?”

“Probably looking for parking. I made him drop me off at the front door so I could get here sooner,” she said with a watery chuckle as she sat down next to him on the bed.

“Mom,” he said, closing his eyes as she cupped the side of his face and brushed her thumb over his still wet cheek. “The doctors say I might never play guitar again,” he said, his voice breaking.

“Nonsense,” she said, letting her hand fall from his face to grasp his good hand.

“But the blood flow got caught off to my hand, and I can’t feel it, and they don’t know if they can fix it, and I might never be able to use it again. And if I can’t play guitar, what am I supposed to do? I don’t know how to do anything else, I don’t—”

“Jack, take a breath, sweetheart. It’s not the end of your career. We’ll figure something out,” she said with such conviction he wanted to believe her. But it wasn’t that simple.

“But –”

“Did Django give up when he lost the use of his fingers on his left hand?”

“No, but –”

“That’s right,” she said, standing dramatically from the bed. “He created a new technique to compensate for the loss of his fingers. And what about Tony Iommi? Did he give up when he lost the tips of his fingers in a factory accident.”

“Actually, he almost –”

“No,” she quickly interrupted him again. “He strung his guitar with banjo strings and made fake finger tips out of soap bottles.”

“I know you’re just trying to make me feel better,” Jack said, “but they didn’t lose their whole hand, just a couple of fingers.”

“You don’t know that yet, sweetheart,” she said, sitting back down next to him. "The surgery could go just fine." 

“I can’t feel my hand. I haven’t been able to feel my hand in days. I didn’t want to think about it, but I don’t think I ever will.”

“It’s still not the end, sweetheart,” his mother insisted.

He shook his head, because she just didn’t get it.

“You can learn to play left handed guitar. You can play rhythm instead of lead. You can take up drums. This doesn’t have to be the end, unless you want it to be,” she said, phrasing the last part like a question.

“No, I don’t,” he said, shaking his head again and looking away from her knowing gaze. “But what if I can’t do any of those things either?”

“Then we’ll take it one day at a time from there and figure it out, together,” she said, taking his good hand in her own again. “If music is what you still want to do, there are other careers.”

Jack scoffed. There were plenty of careers in music. He could rattle off a couple dozen right now. But there were no careers for an uneducated, one-handed person like him. “I don’t even have my GED.”

“No, but you have something much more valuable: experience, and an ear for guitar. Sweetheart,” she said, squeezing his hand, “You are still very young. You still have plenty of time to figure this out. I know these last few weeks must have been very traumatizing for you, and that you’ve seen horrors I couldn’t even dream of, even in my darkest nightmares, but if there’s a way, _we_ will find it, together. It may take a while, it may take years, but you’ve got an amazing crew waiting for you. Everything will be okay in time.”

Jack felt his eyes water once more. He knew his mother was just trying to be helpful, but he didn’t want another career in music, not yet at least. And even if everything went perfect with his surgery, and he picked up the guitar again, no one could guarantee everything would be okay, because no one could guarantee that everyone in his band, that everyone in his _family,_ would still be alive long enough to wait for him, long enough to see tomorrow even.

And without his family, without his guitar, was this still a life worth living?  


	3. Chapter 3A

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because it is taking me an embarrassingly long time to finish this story, you're only getting half a chapter right now due to the fact that it'll probably take me at least another week to finish the second half, aka Justin's part, and it's already been a super long time since I last posted. I am just overthinking every little piece of this story, and it's driving me crazy. 
> 
> I'd also like to dedicate this chapter to ohnoanotheroneofthese (didnotthinkitwouldcometothis). Thanks again for answering all my questions. I'm still not sold on Wattpad, but I am giving it a second chance. I also took your advice, and I have actually found a few stories that I haven't read!

The first thing Gabe felt upon waking up to the sound of his own heart beat broadcast on a static filled monitor was a profound sense of relief.

Death seemed so certain as he had bled out in that prison. He felt the devil himself nipping at his heels, the cold grasp of Satan clenched around his heart as the blood dripped from his abdomen. There had been _so much_ of his blood, more than he thought his body could hold, left on that cold tile floor.

He wasn’t ready to die, hadn’t even thought of the possibility before that bullet tore through his guts, but survival seemed like a hopeless pipe dream, a leaf floating on the wind just beyond his grasp. Death would claim him kicking and screaming.

But it would claim him nonetheless, no matter the tantrum he threw.

As he had laid on that dirty mattress with Kellin, fighting what seemed the inevitable, he saw the same hopelessness he felt reflected in Kellin’s eyes. But underneath that hopelessness, underneath the uncertainly of death, there had been acceptance of the devil knocking on both their doors. It brought him back to a moment 10 years ago when he saw the same look in the same eyes, a moment on the edge of a bridge. It was a moment he didn’t quite understand the severity of while it happened, but when he did finally grasp the situation, he promised himself it would be a moment that never happened again.

And yet, somehow, it _did,_ and he had not the strength to stop it.

He had clung weakly to Kellin, and whispered apologies over and over again until Kellin had grasped his hand and offered a watery smile. “Don’t be afraid,” Kellin had said. “We’ll open our eyes to a better place.”

Kellin _believed._ He believed in something more than the cold reality of earth, in something more than the nothingness that death seemed. But Gabe had no such conviction, no such hope.

He knew it was … silly, pointless to worry over something he had no control over.

But to fear is human. To fear is to be alive.

He worried what would happen to his family the most, to his brothers in the band and his brother by blood. He feared his death may leave a hole too big in their hearts, though, he believed, given time, they would be okay. They could move on. His father, though? Gabe worried about his father the most. Gabe had lost his mother at a young age, and it devastated his father. To cope with the loss, his father made his two young sons his entire life, put even his son’s whims before his own needs. Gabe wasn’t sure his father could handle losing someone else so close to him without falling apart completely.

 

Gabe had worried about his dog a lot, too. What would happen to Bentley if Gabe wasn’t there to take care of him? It’s not like he had a will. He never thought he needed one.

All he could think about was that dumb commercial with the dog that waited all night for his owner who never came home because the man had killed himself in drunk driving accident. That damn commercial broke his heart every time.

Or the thought of Bentley sitting in an animal shelter, wondering why he’d been left there, wondering why Gabe never came back for him? It was too much to bare.

But somehow, someway, by some miracle, Gabe _had_ survived.

“It lives,” he heard his younger brother, Marcus, say in a deep, dramatic voice like Frankenstein when his monster first awoke.

“Are you sure?” Gabe heard his father ask. “I didn’t see anything.”

“His eyes fluttered. Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey,” his brother said, as Gabe felt movement near his face. Gabe took no offense to his brother’s seemingly light tone despite the situation, because he knew that’s just how Marcus coped when things hit too close to home.

“I think you were seeing things, Marcus,” his father grumpily said.

“I know he’s awake,” Marcus insisted. “Gabe, let us know you’re awake right now or I’ll tell Dad about that party where Mindy –”

With great force, Gabe pried his eyes open. 

“You wouldn’t dare,” Gabe groaned. His throat felt like someone shoved a sword down it, but not just any sword, one that was lit on fire and full of barbs. He swallowed reflexively, but there was no spit in his mouth to parch his dry throat. “Get your fingers away from my face,” Gabe rasped, and tried to bat his brother’s hand away, but his arm refused to cooperate, jerking uselessly on the bed instead.

“Son, how do you feel?” his father asked, his eyes softening with relief as he hovered over Gabe’s bed. Stanford L. Barham was as tough as they came. He dropped out of school at 17, married his wife – aka Gabe’s mother – at 19, and worked hard labor, blue collar jobs his entire life. He came from that old generation, the one that believed that silly stuff like men had to be the head of the family, the bread maker, the tough-as-nails-never-show-emotion kind of guy. And he played that role every day, _except_ in the love he showed for his sons. Gabe never once doubted that his father loved him, and his father never once tried to hide it. Still, Gabe had only ever seen his father cry three times in his entire life: once at his mother’s funeral, once at his father’s first wedding anniversary after his wife’s death, and once when Sleeping With Sirens made their first magazine cover. If there were other times, his father expertly hid it from Gabe and his brother.

But as Gabe pried his eyes open, and blinked away the crust gathered in the corners, he noticed there were tears in his father’s eyes now. For his father’s sake alone, the relief that he’d made it through after all rushed through him once more.  

“I’ll be okay, Dad,” he said, patting his father’s hand. Though in honesty, he had no idea if that were true. “Right?” he added, looking to his brother.

“You’re gonna live,” Marcus said with his smug little brother attitude. His father looked away as his brother said it, though, and Marcus didn’t seem quite as cocky as he usually was.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Gabe asked.

Marcus and his father shared a look. Gabe heard his heart monitor pick up speed as he suddenly felt more alert despite the drugs that must have been pumped into his system.

“Calm down,” his father said. “It’s just … The bullet pierced your spleen. It was too damaged and they couldn’t save it, so the doctors had to take out it out. Don’t worry, you can live without it just fine, but you’ll be more prone to infections and you might have to take meds for the rest of your life because of it.”

“So it’s not gonna like kill me in my 30s or something?” Gabe asked, finally regaining enough coordination in his hand to wipe his eyes. He tried to play off his statement as a joke, but deep inside he still felt the panic of a moment ago, and he wasn’t sure how he would react if his father told him yes. He had come too close to dying once already, and wasn’t quite up to facing the possibility so soon again.

“It shouldn’t,” his father reassured, and Gabe finally felt his heart slow down. “They say you should be able to live like you did before, you just might have to take meds now.”

 _I can deal with that, I think,_ he told himself and hoped it was true. “How are the rest of the guys?”

“Let’s not worry about that right now. Just focus on yourself and getting better, okay?” his father evaded.

“Oh God,” Gabe said, hearing his monitor race even faster than before. He felt it pounding in his chest, beating against his ribcage. “Did someone die? Is Kellin … is Kellin dead? Or Vic? Or Mike?”

Gabe remembered the moment Kellin reached up and smacked the button to close the elevator in that God forsaken hotel. He had wanted to beat against the doors like Justin, or pry them open with brute strength like Nick and Jaime had tried, or repeatedly jab the ‘open’ button like Tony had, but he had been too weak to rise, too weak to help. Too weak to stop his friends from sacrificing themselves so _he_ could have a chance of survival. In the end, despite their frantic calls, they had each watched in stunned horror as the elevator carried them to safety, trapping their friends below and possibly condemning them to their death.

Kellin may have been willing to accept death …

But Gabe was not ready to watch him die.

It killed him to watch those doors close. Even now he felt an echo of regret, bitterness, and anger - and a faint hint of gratitude - that his friends were so willing to sacrifice themselves, were _so_ willing to throw their lives away.

It wasn’t fair.

And he’d never forget the feeling of loss that rushed through him in that moment as they disappeared from his sight.

When the doors opened again, it had been a relief to see the police already swarming the small hotel lobby. Their manager had done as Vic asked and filed a missing person’s report, and the police happened to choose that day to check the hotel. The police got everyone off the elevator quickly and headed down to the basement. It was out of his hands at that point, out of Gabe’s control, and he could only pray they would make it in time. He wanted to stay, he wanted to know what happened, but the paramedics refused to let Gabe wait to see if his friends were okay. They threw around words like ‘too much blood loss,’ and ‘every second counted,’ then threw him into the back of an ambulance.

Gabe figured he would die without ever knowing what happened.

But perhaps the uncertainty of their fate would have been better than knowing the truth.

“Nobody died, son. Calm down,” his father said, and Gabe knew it to be true. His father was a shit liar, which is how he also knew there was something he wasn’t telling him.

“But?” he prompted when neither his brother or his father made a move to continue.

“Just tell him,” his brother said to his father. His father shook his head no, and Marcus blew air nosily through his nose before stomping to his feet.  For a moment, he was confused as his brother pulled the curtain around his bed back.

Then Gabe saw him: Vic sitting by the bed next to Gabe’s. Vic was fast asleep, head resting on the wall, one arm in a sling, the other clasped with the occupant’s of the bed.  Clad only in thin scrubs, Vic looked like shit, eyes puffy and bags so dark they looked like bruises. Though the person on the bed faced away from Gabe, propped up on his side by a wedge, he knew Vic would only sit like that for two people, and the person was far too pale and far too short to be Mike.

“Is that Kellin?” He tried to lift his upper body to get a better look, but stopped short with a gasp when pain shot through his abdomen.

“Take it easy, son,” his father said, his eyes knit with concern as he pushed Gabe back down on the bed. He ignored his father and continued to push forward, asking, “Is he going to be okay?”

“Gabe, I don’t really think now –”

“Don’t give me that. I want to know!” he demanded, pushing against his father’s hand on his shoulder. An alarm on his heart monitor began to go off.

“They don’t know,” his brother finally said, the words rushing out of him as his eyes flicked towards Gabe’s heart monitor. “It’s 50/50. I’m so sorry, Gabe.”

Gabe fell back against the sheets as two nurses burst through the door.

“I’m fine _,_ ” Gabe insisted, resisting the urge to bat away the hands of the nurses as they fussed over him.

“Sir, you need to calm down,” the older nurse said.

“I’m _fine,_ ” Gabe snapped, this time flinching away from the nurse as she went to check his IV again.

The woman pursed her lips and stood up straight. “A doctor will be with you shortly,” she said, turning on her heels and fussing over Kellin instead. His clenched his fist as all her damn fussing woke up Vic, who looked beyond exhausted.

“Son,” his father gently chided, but Gabe couldn’t find it in himself to care.

In normal situations, he thought maybe he might have felt guilt for his curt behavior. He thought maybe he should still feel the relief he felt upon waking, or the fear he felt in the maze, or perhaps gratitude that his life had been spared.

Instead, he was just angry now and he didn’t know how to make it stop.

**

They let Gabe have a moment alone with Kellin before transferring him from the ICU to a regular room. Vic hovered just outside the door held slightly ajar by his foot, the lines of his body tense, ready to rush back in at any moment.

It told him exactly how dire Kellin’s situation was.

The nurses had taken the wedge out and left Kellin lying on his back, hiding the cuts that were slowly poisoning his body. From his wheelchair, Gabe grasped Kellin’s pale arm, alarmed at how hot his skin felt.

Gabe still remembered the moment he met Kellin in high school. Kellin moved around a lot as a kid, so he learned to make friends in new places by picking out the kids with band shirts and introducing himself. _“It works 85% of the time,”_ Kellin had later told him with a huge smile, one Gabe now knew after years of friendship to be his fake smile. Gabe didn’t ask about the other 15%. Going for broke, Kellin had politely introduced himself to Justin, who had been wearing an AC/DC shirt at the time. It was Justin who later introduced Kellin to Gabe.

Justin could fake politeness to just about anybody like it was his job; too many Sundays spent forced at church taught him that particular behavior. But Justin rarely truly liked people and let them into his small social circle. So it came as quite the surprise to Gabe when Justin and Kellin became fast friends, nearly inseparable as the weeks went by. Initially, though, Gabe thought of Kellin as nothing more than Justin’s annoying tagalong. 

Kellin had been friendly and outgoing, but he’d been painfully awkward. Though that hadn’t changed too much to now, he thought with a small chuckle. Kellin had been kind, as well. _Too_ kind, in fact, a quality that got taken advantage of if Justin wasn’t there.

Gabe didn’t know for sure, but he thought that’s how Kellin may have ended up in the local band, he, Justin and two of their other friends had created. There was a nagging feeling at the time that Shawn, the lead singer and rhythm guitarist, had invited Kellin in the band simply as joke, as a way to make fun of the kid.

No one expected Kellin to be better than Shawn at being a front man. Shawn had an amazing voice, but Kellin’s voice was unique, something not a lot of people in the scene could mimic. And while he often got made fun of for it, usually by Shawn, his voice made people pay attention. It made their band stand out in a very crowded field.

It also made Shawn jealous.

Two days before their band was set to play their biggest show yet, Shawn decided Kellin was a liability. He manipulated Derrick, the lead guitarist in the band, into agreeing with him that Kellin needed to go, and Gabe had gone along with it because Shawn had been right: Kellin wasn’t an original member and they didn’t really need him. Kellin was just sort of Justin’s friend, not his own.

Shawn purposefully picked a time he knew Justin would not be there to tell Kellin the news. At the time, Gabe thought Kellin took it pretty well. But Gabe didn’t put too much thought into what would happen to the other teen after.

Justin lost his shit when he found out. He played the event with the band, but never really forgave Shawn for what he did and the band broke up immediately after the concert. Gabe thought Justin threw a fit simply because of how loyal he tended to be to the people he cared about. Justin was loyal to a fault, and did not care whose toes he had to step on to defend a friend, even if he knew the friend was in the wrong.

Even then, Gabe still failed to realized just how close Justin and Kellin had become until a few weeks later when he caught Justin talking the older teen out of throwing himself off of Dead Men’s Bridge - named so because of the number of suicides that occurred there – over the phone, while driving like a maniac to get to Kellin before he did anything stupid.

Gabe had stood awkwardly to the side while Justin had comforted Kellin. He was only there because he happened to be in the car when Justin got the call.  Everything had just sort of compounded on the young singer. His father didn’t want anything to do with him and his sister, even refusing their phone calls. His mother had gotten remarried and had three kids. Kellin knew she didn’t mean to, but since Kellin and his sister were old enough to take care of themselves, they’d sort of been pushed to the side and left on their own a lot, because the younger kids needed more attention. Kellin understood why, but he couldn’t help feeling neglected. Add that to the fact that he’d been suffering from bipolar depression since he was 12, Shawn kicking him out of the band was just the cherry on top of that sad sundae.

Gabe had felt guilty then. Guilty for thinking of Kellin as just Justin’s annoying tagalong, guilty for judging him for the fake persona he used to hide his depression, and guilty for his part in kicking Kellin out of the band. It took years before the full severity of the situation settled deep inside of him, and Gabe finally realized just how close Kellin had come to ending his life and that something Gabe had done had pushed him that far.

But by the time he had realized it, Kellin had already moved away and Gabe never expected to hear from him again.

Even though Justin and Kellin kept in touch, it was still quite the shock when Kellin called Justin a few years later looking to start a new band after he submitted a few demos to a record company, and said, “Bring Gabe along,” when Justin suggested it.

Kellin had always been too nice.

But when Sleeping With Sirens formed, Gabe vowed it wouldn’t just be Justin telling anyone trying to prey on that kindness to fuck off. Gabe would be right there, too.  After all, he never did apologize for what he had done.

He promised himself that he would never let Kellin, or anyone he loved, get that look in their eyes, the look Kellin had in his eyes when Justin demanded he get off the ledge of the bridge and he _hesitated,_ stood on the edge a moment too long, contemplated for even just a moment whether or not life was really worth living. A look of hopelessness, and acceptance, and a stunning lack of fear.

At the very least, he knew Kellin hadn’t wanted to die in that labyrinth, but Kellin had felt death was certain and had been ready to accept it. Ready to let go, ready to die, even if that meant never seeing Vic or his family again. And maybe the situation was different, but he couldn’t get those eyes out of his head.

Once again, he’d played a part in it. Only this time it wasn’t naivety, or selfishness, or an inability to think things through.

He simply hadn’t been strong enough.

“You ready to go?” the same nurse that bothered him early apparated behind him and asked. He clenched his fist and said nothing as they wheeled him to his room, knowing this might just be the very last time he ever saw Kellin alive.

~~-~~

“I can do it,” Gabe hissed, jerking his arm out of the orderly’s grasp as he shakily pushed himself from the wheelchair, his abdomen searing with pain. His legs immediately gave out on him, buckling at the knees like two twigs. _God,_ he couldn’t even _stand_ on his own. The two orderlies on either side and his father standing behind him caught him, lifting him off his useless legs and sliding him onto the hospital bed. He clenched his teeth so hard his jaw hurt.

“If you need to use the bathroom, just press this button here, dear, and an orderly will assist you,” the nurse said, handing him the remote to his bed.

 _That’s not happening,_ he thought, his glare boring into the back of her head as she hurried out of the room. He huffed as she turned the corner and disappeared from sight, and slammed the remote down on the bed, just barely resisting the urge to throw it on the ground.

“You just got out of surgery,” his father said, knowing that look all too well from Gabe’s rebellious teenage years. “It’s okay to need help.”

“I know,” Gabe said tightly, and looked at the occupant of the other bed. When they wheeled him from the ICU to an equally bland, sterile, lifeless hospital room, Gabe was startled, but relieved, to see Justin lying on the bed closest to the door. Though Justin was fast asleep and oblivious to Gabe’s presence, his proximity brought a sense of comfort. ~~~~

“Are you sure you don’t want us to stay the night, big bro?” Marcus said, purposefully moving himself in front of Gabe to block his view of Justin.

“I’m sure,” Gabe said, letting his shoulders relax and his gaze travel up to his brother’s. “You guys have been sitting by my bed for two days now. You need a break. Go get some real sleep at a hotel. I’ll be okay.”

“We’ll be back in the morning,” his father said.

“I know,” Gabe replied, and offered a tight smile, knowing his father and brother would probably be back at 5am, sitting at his side again. He loved them, and he did want them here … But at the moment, all Gabe really needed was to be alone.  

He lied alone with his thoughts for hours, trying to process what had happened to him, to all of them, but he couldn’t even begin to wrap his head around it. There wasn’t any logic in the madness of humanity.

Despite his thoughts, sleep tugged at him, demanding he rest, though the pain killers may have had a hand in that. But no matter how close he came to the edge of unconsciousness, he couldn’t quite fall over the edge for one simple, easily resolvable problem.

Gabe had to pee.

He had to pee bad, so bad it hurt to the point he almost, _almost,_ wished he still had the catheter he woke up with.

He refused to press the button for the nurse, though. He didn’t need them. The bathroom was only 10 feet away, closer than the bathroom was to their bunks in their bus. If he could do that drunk off his ass and seeing double, he could do this now, _on his own_.

Though his arms trembled under his weight, Gabe pushed himself to a sitting position and swung his feet over the edge of his bed. Though pain shot through his abdomen, he placed his feet on the ground. Clutching his IV pole, Gabe stood. His knees buckled, but held firm. Inch by agonizing inch, he shuffled forward, using his IV pole as a crutch. With each step, his legs trembled more and more, his knees feeling weak and numb. He made it just past Justin’s bed before, with a resounding crash and a startled yelp, Gabe collapsed in a heap on the ground.

Pain rippled from the wound in his stomach, like he was getting shot all over again. He panted with the pain, waiting for it to recede to a dull ache. Just a few moments, that’s all he needed. Just a few moments to wait for the pain to recede, then he’d climb to his feet and make it to the bathroom _on his own._

“What are you doing on the floor?” a voice asked, startling Gabe, and making the pain flare to life once more as he jumped.

“Trying to go to the bathroom,” Gabe said, flopping over on his back hoping to dull the pain quicker.

“In the middle of the room?” Justin asked, rolling over in his bed to face Gabe.

“I _fell,_ you asshole,” Gabe said, and heard Justin snicker.

“Do you need me to call the nurse?”

“ _No,_ ” Gabe insisted.

“Uh huh,” Justin said, his total lack of faith in Gabe’s ability to make to the bathroom on his own apparent in his voice.

“I can make it on my own,” Gabe insisted. “I just need a moment.”

“Whatever you say,” Justin said.

Despite the pain still attacking his stomach like a cat its prey, Gabe pulled himself to a sitting position just to prove to Justin he could do it. “Don’t, don’t take this the wrong way, but why are you still here?” Gabe asked, trying to shift Justin’s scrutiny away from him. To his relief, it worked. Justin’s gaze shuttered and fell away from his intense stare at Gabe. “Are, are you okay? There’s nothing, like, physically majorly wrong, right?”

“I’m fine,” Justin said, rolling so he was on his back. “They’re just keeping me for a few days to keep an eye on the infection in my fingers.”

“What about Jack and Nick? Do you … Do you know if they’re okay? Are they still here?” Gabe asked. He had tried to get the information out of his brother and father, but his father insisted that ‘now was not the time’ and Gabe needed to ‘focus on his own recovery.’ His father failed to realize that Gabe could not recover if he was worrying about his friends.

“Jack is still here. They had to do surgery on his arm. They let Nick go, but he’s staying in a hotel until … until Kellin gets better.” He heard Justin sniffle a few times, and felt more than just the pain of his gunshot wound clench uncomfortably in his stomach.

Like Gabe’s father, Justin rarely cried. In fact, outside of the maze, Gabe could only recall one time he had ever seen Justin come close to crying, and that had been when their van had spun out on an icy road in the middle of the night and they’d come oh so close to crashing.

It reminded him once more of just how close Justin and Kellin were. Gabe loved Kellin like a brother, too, but he never understood why those two were so close. He never knew why they had bonded so quickly in high school, nor why Justin was so quick to defend Kellin, nor why Justin had picked Kellin over their first band, nor why Justin was always so protective of him. Nor did he know why Kellin was always the first, and sometimes the only, person Justin shared his secrets with. Gabe had briefly thought the night at the bridge might have had something to do with, but the two had been close before that night, and Justin had been aggressively protective before then, as well.

Sometimes people just clicked, he guessed, and there didn’t always have to be a rhyme or reason.

Justin rolled his back to him, his sniffles seeming loud in the quiet of their hospital room.

Gabe said nothing. In that moment, he was a weak, pathetic excuse of a human being. He didn’t have the strength to save his friends in that dungeon, he didn’t have the words to comfort Justin, and if he was being honest with himself, he did not have the strength to even rise from the floor.

For the first time since that night at the bridge, it really, truly felt like there was absolutely nothing he could do. 

“Ah, Mr. Barham,” the same nurse from the ICU who had led him to his room said. Did the woman _ever_ go home? “I thought I might find you in this position.”

“You called the nurse on me?” Gabe said, forcing a chuckle. Justin did not turn around.

This time, Gabe buried his annoyance as the orderlies helped him. He held his tongue even when they watched him pee. He was grateful, after all, to be alive. Grateful his father did not have to bury a second loved one, grateful for a chance to live his life.

But what did that really mean if Kellin did not make it? What was life if none of them could recover from this?

He wished he had the courage to say he'd trade it all away, his life, his second chance, _everything_ to make everyone in his band okay. But he did not even have the strength for wishes. 


	4. Chapter 3B

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised myself that I wasn’t going to make any of the guys’ parents jerks, and then I went and made Justin’s dad a dick. Apparently, I cannot help myself. Also, I know Kellin's sister's name is Kailey (or something along those lines) in real life, but as I stated in the first chapter, I don't like using real non-famous people in my stories. You would have gotten this chapter sooner, but I'm a dumb dumb who accidentally deleted all of the edits I made to this chapter and had to go back and re-edit. This is another rough chapter, but I promise in the second half of the story, each chapter has a hopeful undertone. Except maybe not the next chapter. 
> 
> Also, thanks to colorblindbody, firetruckyeah, ohnoanotheroneofthese (didnotthinkitwouldcometothis), and Madison Futch for your kind comments on the last chapter.

Justin had woken up alone in his shitty hospital room in this shitty Podunk town for the second straight day in a row and kind of wished he had never woken up at all.

On that same day - the day he was supposed to be released from the hospital - he made the mistake of telling his nurse those thoughts in a regrettable bout of word vomit after she said the four words he hated most:

_Your family is here._

After his ill-advised outburst, his nurse had given him the same smile she did every morning, and continued with her same routine as usual, before disappearing from his lonely room. Ten minutes later, she came back with a doctor.

That was _not_ so usual.

The doctor – psychiatrist, he quickly learned – asked him questions ranging from a simple ‘how are you feeling today’ to ‘do you feel like hurting yourself right now?’

Perhaps answering with his usual dry and dark humor that people rarely understood outside of his close-knit group of friends was not the correct way to go about answering those questions.

The doctor – psychiatrist – promptly delayed his release, and strongly recommended Justin stay in the hospital for a few more days under suicide watch.

The hospital couldn’t really hold him against his will, though, and he supposed he could leave at any moment if he so desired. But he needed to stick around until Gabe and Kellin recovered, and considering everything that had just happened, Justin very much preferred to stay in the hospital over another hotel.

So he shrugged when the psychiatrist suggested it, agreed to stay and to attend a single therapy session. He drew the line at any more drugs, though, because Justin absolutely refused to add anymore strange chemicals to his body. Plus, he wasn’t really suicidal. At least, he didn’t think he was, but what he had said to the nurse? A small, tiny, buried part of him knows that had not been his twisted sense of humor making a warped, humorless joke. He really did just want to sleep; for the day, for the week, until he could wake up and everything would be fine again, even if that meant sleeping forever.

But mostly, Justin thought, he really, really, _really_ did not want to see his family.

Justin kind of hated his family.

Well, he kind of, definitely _wanted_ to hate his father, at the very least.

But the thing about family was no matter how shitty they were to you, it was almost impossible to hate someone you were told your whole life you were supposed to love.

And apparently, no matter how awful and cruel his father could be emotionally sometimes, _Justin_ was the shitty person for not wanting to love him. 

At least, that’s what everyone told him his entire life, and made him feel guilty for every time he showed an inkling of stepping over the line of their version of acceptable behavior.

Justin wasn’t even allowed to call his father out on his bullshit without someone shaming him for it.

It took one very special person to finally show up in his life and tell Justin it was okay for him to feel the way he did. That just because the man provided the sperm that created him, if the man did not act like a father, did not care for Justin as he should, was emotionally _abusive_ than Justin was not obligated to love the man. 

It was the first time anyone had ever used the word abuse in regards to his situation. The first time anyone had actually acknowledged what was really happening instead of simply telling him to get over it, or telling him he we was lucky because it could be so much worse, or rebuking _him_ for responding negatively to it. 

While Justin may never get over his shitty childhood, that simple acceptance for the first time of his feelings helped him release a lot of the bitterness he’d been holding onto. He toned down on the rebellious acting out that nearly got him arrested several times in his youth, stopped excessively partying, and began to seriously focus on music. And he owed it all simply because of the first seven words Kellin had said to him the night they met.

_“Your father is kind of a douche.”_

Justin still didn’t know how Kellin even knew those were the words he needed to hear. His father wasn’t even being that bad, and it certainly was not the worst Justin had ever heard from him.

It had been after a school band concert, after the first and only time Justin performed a solo for his orchestra. He walked alongside his family afterwards to their beige minivan, head hung low as he listened to his father criticize every single part of not just his, but the entire band’s, performance. Berating him for everything from not performing better to not getting a solo earlier in high school to holding that one note just a little long, like he knew anything at all about music, and stating he could have done a better job when he'd never even picked up an instrument before. All Justin wanted was a simple ‘you did good, son,’ or an ‘I’m proud of you;’ the four words he wanted to hear most, and knew he never would. As usual, his mother had done nothing to stop his father. In fact, she had said nothing at all.

Unable to listen to it anymore, he refused to get into the van. Again, his mother said nothing as he stalked off, stating he’d rather walk home. His father just had to have the last word and called him a baby as he turned around and fled. Justin disappeared around the corner of the school away from the taunts of his father calling after him, his stomach in knots and his mind attacking him like it usually did after any conversation at all with his father. Why wasn’t he good enough for the man? Why was everything he did wrong? Why would he never be good enough? 

Thankfully, Justin did not make it very far down the dangerous path his thoughts were leading him before he literally tripped over Kellin’s feet.

In his defense, though, Kellin had been sitting on the ground, back against the red brick walls of the school, half hidden in the shadows and the overgrown hedges planted randomly around the building. 

Justin had fallen to the ground, and became tangled in Kellin’s legs. Quickly, he sprung to his feet, ready to lash out, ready to yell, ready to unleash all his pent-up anger at his father and himself on the poor, unsuspecting kid. Then the kid looked up at him with eyes that glinted too bright in the streetlights and said, “Your dad is kind of a douche.”

Every harsh word Justin had planned to say died on his lips.

“Is he?” Justin had warily said, and against his better judgement sat next to the other teen on the cold ground, back pressed against the bricks, knees drawn to his chest.

Kellin had nodded jerkily and used his sleeve to wipe at his face. “I thought your solo was amazing.”

Justin took his first real look at the other kid, and though Kellin had smiled shyly at him, he looked like Justin felt in that moment: about five seconds away from an ugly breakdown.

He could have asked the kid why he was there, why he was hiding in the bushes, why he looked as miserable as Justin felt.

Instead, it was Justin who broke, _snapped_ like a twig under a cow’s hooves. Embarrassingly, he ended up spilling his guts to this kid, this _stranger_ he had just met. And for the first time in his life, someone had listened to Justin; someone listened and didn’t judge. Kellin didn’t try to offer any pointless advice, didn’t tell him he needed to be nicer to his father, didn’t tell him how he thought Justin should fix his relationship with his father. Instead he said ‘it’s okay to feel these things,’ words no one had ever said to him before.

“Why am I not good enough?” he had asked Kellin, eyes as bright as Kellin’s were a moment ago.

“It’s not you,” Kellin had said. “There’s nothing wrong with you at all.”

He had meant to ask Kellin why he had looked so broken, too, but someone had come to pick Kellin up and his chance slipped away. By the time Justin had tracked Kellin down at school the next day and invited him to sit with him and his friends at lunch, Kellin had glued a mask over the broken look Justin had seen just the night before. When Gabe asked how the two had met, Kellin spun some bullshit story and Justin went along with it, because he was too embarrassed to admit how they really met.

To this day, Justin still does not know why Kellin had been hiding in those bushes.

He got his chance to partially repay Kellin for that night a few months later when he answered his phone, and in a shaky voice Kellin said, "I don't know what to do," as he stood on the edge of a bridge. Justin had never been so terrified in his life.

Kellin always told him Justin saved his life that day on the bridge, but he didn’t know if Kellin knew how much that conversation against the school really meant to him. He didn’t know if Kellin knew that he’d saved Justin’s life just by listening every time Justin vented to him after he just could not take the things his father said anymore. Justin had never told him, just sort of hoped he knew.

Now, he may never get the chance to tell him.

A knock on his door threw him from his thoughts. “Your family is here,” a nurse said with a bright cheery smile as if it was a good thing his father was in the same building as him.

He could only imagine how awful this was going to be, especially since he did not have Kellin to talk to in the aftermath. After his father tore him down with his harsh words, Kellin always helped Justin rebuild himself, and he didn’t realize how much he had come to rely on him until that support was no longer there waiting to catch him if he fell.

“Justin, sweetheart,” his mother said, a touch of relief in her voice, as she strode in the room, arms out wide. She embraced him, and he stiffly returned the hug, unable to completely relax in her presence as his father stood directly behind her. He was surprised, however, to see his older sister, Mandi, and his older brother, Derrick, also come into the room, not that that made the situation much better.

Growing up, Derrick had been a lot like their mother when it came to their father’s emotional abuse. His older brother just sort of pretended it wasn’t happening, and lived in this alternate reality where everything was perfect all the time. Being 10 years older than Justin, though, Derrick had moved out when Justin was just 8 years old, and the two were not close and saw eye to eye on almost nothing. Mandi understood, he thought. She understood, and she often let Justin rant to her while growing up. And while she at least acknowledged the problem, she often buried her own feelings on the subject, rarely talked about it, and often fell into that trap of pretending it didn’t exist. Justin didn’t know how either of them did it, how they just turned off their thoughts and ignored the vicious things coming out of their father’s mouth like it didn’t affect them.

But he really wished he could do that right now, really wished he could ignore the man entirely, really wished he could just make the man disappear with the power of his thoughts and live in the alternate reality his brother pretended existed.

“Hi, Mom,” he said, awkwardly patting her on the back as she squeezed him tightly.

“Are you all right, sweetheart?” his mother asked, thankfully letting go of him. She sat on the bed and took one of his bandaged hands in her own.

What Justin wanted to say was, _“I was tortured and held captive by a psychopath, the same psychopath I watched torture my friends. And now one of my best friends might be dying, and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it. Of course I’m not fine_.” However, in the presence of his father, Justin would not dare declare his true feelings and provide his father with any ammo whatsoever to belittle and degrade Justin with.

So instead he shrugged, and said, “I’m fine.”

“You have a cracked cheekbone, possible damage and vision loss to your eye, broken ribs, all your finger nails were ripped off, and you’re dehydrated,” his sister said as she flipped through his file kept at the end of his bed. "Not to mention your face looks like someone took a hammer -"

"Lead pipe," he murmured, and heard his mother gasp.

"Oh, my bad. Your face definitely looks like someone took a lead pipe to it." 

“Like I said, I’m fine. Now put that down,” Justin insisted, hoping she wouldn’t flip to the section stating the real reason why he was still in the hospital. If Mandi noticed, she said nothing and promptly put the file back.

“What about your friends?” his mother asked. “How is everyone else?”

“They’ll be okay for the most part, but Kellin’s still in the ICU,” he said, knowing his mother, who had taken an instant liking to Kellin the first time they met in high school, would want to know. “It doesn’t look good,” he added, keeping his voice as neutral as possible, not wanting to expose an ounce of emotion for his father to pounce on. He was surprised the man had kept hold of his tongue this long.

Tears welled in his mother's eyes at the news about Kelllin, but like Justin she knew to keep her emotions in check and quickly composed herself. 

“What about the man who did this?” his brother, who had been leaning against the doorframe of his room, asked. Derrick finally pushed himself off the door and came to sit next to Justin’s bed.

“Dead.”

“There wasn’t anyone else, was there?” his mother asked, tucking the hospital blanket in around his legs and smoothing out the wrinkles. “He doesn’t have an accomplice out there somewhere that I have to worry about coming after you?”

“I don’t think so.”

His mother let out a sigh of relief.

His father, on the other hand, asked, “Just the one man then?”

To an outsider, the question may have simply seemed like a concerned father making sure there was no unknown assailant waiting in the shadows to attack his vulnerable son. But Justin knew better. He glanced at his father from the corner of his eyes, keeping his face as neutral as possible.

“Charles,” his mother warned, surprising Justin. She, too, knew something truly awful was about to spew from the trash bin his father called a mouth, and for once attempted to derail that train wreck before it left the station.

“What? I’m just saying five full grown men, well, four and a half,” his father amended. Under the blankets, Justin clenched his hands into fists, knowing full well that was a jab at Kellin, who his father thought was 'too feminine' and had 'too girly of a voice' to be a 'real man.' It was not the first time his father had made such belittling remarks about his friend. “Got taken out by one man, and it took four more to save you. I mean, it’s kind of pathetic.”

“Charles,” his mother hissed, but his father pressed on.

“And then we had to completely upend our lives and pay an exorbitant amount of money to grab a plane to come here to see you, even though ‘you’re fine,’” his father said.

“No one asked you to be here,” Justin said quietly, almost in the hopes his father wouldn’t hear him.

“Dad, maybe you and Mom should back to the hotel,” his brother cut in quickly, interrupting whatever trash was about to spill from his father.

“That’s a good idea,” his mother said, swiftly standing to her feet and pulling his father from the room. He kind of hoped they never came back.

“He means well,” his brother said from whatever imaginary la la land he lived in.

“Yeah, sure. Whatever,” Justin said, catching his sister’s eyes who looked down on him with pity. “All he cares about his is stupid money and his stupid shit.”

“You know that’s not true,” Derrick said with a shake of his head.

“Do I?” Justin asked and looked away from his sister.

He didn’t want to admit how deeply his father’s words had cut. Before Kellin had been raped and nearly beaten to death in front of him, before Gabe had gotten shot, before death decided to circle over Kellin and Gabe like vultures, they had had their chance to escape.

And it all fell to pieces because of him, because he had been a good for nothing wimp, just like his father always said he was. In the moment his friends needed him the most, _Justin_ had frozen like a goddamn ice statue. He failed Kellin, he failed Gabe, he failed everyone.

He really was as pathetic as his father said.

**

Justin woke up in his shitty hospital room in this shitty Podunk town for the fourth straight day in a row and kind of wished he had never woken up at all.

This time he kept his thoughts to himself, and even lied to Gabe when the drummer asked him why he was still in the hospital.

Despite the books from his brother and the magazines from his sister stacked on the bedside table, and the company Gabe provided when he wasn't asleep (which was most of the day) and which Just was grateful to have because it meant Gabe was still alive, Justin did the same thing he did every early afternoon when he could no longer sleep: stared at whatever mindless drivel was on the television or out the window at their wonderful view of the parking lot.

Nick had wheeled Jack by earlier for a visit after Jack’s first PT session. Judging by the look on Jack’s face, it did not go as well as he had hoped, but Justin did not ask.

Justin was really good at that.

He did, however, make the mistake of asking Nick if he knew what had happened to the rest of the crew they had been touring with.

Nick had been reluctant to tell him, but his hesitance said everything. Apparently, they’d been placed in the maze around the same time as them, but in a different spot.

They never made it to the end.

The police found their bodies while searching through the maze. Justin was too afraid to ask Nick how they died.

He knew their deaths was not his fault, that there was nothing he could have done to save them. He had no way of knowing they were even down there. But it still hit him in the gut like a punch. Those were his friends, his employees, and as their boss, he was responsible for their well-being.

Just like he failed his band, he failed them, too.

He could barely bring himself to converse with Nick, Jack, and Gabe before he heard the news, but after Nick told him he shut down, muttering one word answers if asked a question directly. Nick and Jack left shortly after, and he’d let himself fall into a drug induced dreamless sleep.

He woke up to the sound of soft chatter as Gabe spoke with his family. No matter how much Justin wanted to fall back asleep, he was too restless, too awake, too haunted to fall back asleep again.

Justin hoped his family did not come back to visit him today.

Though the tv played some stupid daytime reality show, and the books and magazines sat untouched next to his bed, Justin stared out the window at all the people sporadically entering and exiting the parking lot.  

As Gabe’s family left to get lunch, his eyes accidentally caught Gabe’s gaze, neither looking away from a moment.

“You’re not here because of your fingernails, are you?” Gabe suddenly asked, startling him.

Justin let his gaze fall away, and rolled onto his back, rubbing his bandaged thumbs against the hem of his blanket. “No,” he said. He would not offer more on the subject.

Justin sucked in a breath, and tried to ask the question he’d been too afraid to ask since being admitted to the hospital. He knew only what Mike had told him that first day here. He shut his mouth with a click, his thumbs rubbing harder against the fabric of his blanket to the point it hurt. He took another stuttering breath and tried again, only to snap his mouth closed once again.

“Whatever it is you want to say, you know you can tell me,” Gabe said, his voice soft and inviting, much like Kellin’s had been the day they met.

Only it wasn’t Kellin. And while Justin believed Kellin would survive, had to believe that Kellin would make it, he did not know if Kellin would ever want to speak to him again. Nor did he know if Gabe would forgive him if he knew the truth either. After all, it was Justin who had frozen. It was his fault Gabe had been shot, it his fault Kellin had been raped. And though he had been beaten himself, it did not feel like enough punishment.

“How-how is Kellin?” he managed to stutter out despite the lump forming in his throat.

“You don’t know?” Gabe asked, disbelief coloring his voice. Gabe knew how close he was to Kellin better than anyone, after all.

“Just what Mike told me a couple days ago,” Justin admitted.

“You haven’t gone to see him?” Gabe asked in that same disbelieving tone. Justin was a real shitty person for it. When Justin did not answer his question, Gabe said, “He doesn’t look good,” Gabe admitted. “My brother overheard the doctor’s tell Vic his chances are 50/50. But there’s still hope, right?”

“Yeah,” Justin murmured, looking down at his hands where tiny drops of blood had started to seep through where his thumbnails should have been.

“Why haven’t you gone to see him, Justin?” Gabe asked. It wasn't meant to sound accusatory, he didn’t think, but it chipped away at the cement barrier he’d constructed around himself as child to protect his feelings from people like his father.

He buried his face in his hands, fingers digging into his skin, pain flaring to life at his fingertips. “It’s my fault,” he burst out saying around a suppressed sob.

“What?”

“It was my fault you were shot, it was my fault Kellin was raped. It’s my fault he’s dying. Because he is dying, isn’t he? And I could have done something about it, but now it’s too late.”

“Justin, stop. Stop!” Gabe said, throwing his blanket off and forcing himself to sit with a gasp of pain.

Justin jerked his head towards him, remembering what happened the last time Gabe tried to get up, and realized for the first time that he had been scratching at his face with his bandaged hands, leaving red, burning marks down his forehead and cheeks. His hands stilled, and he dropped them uselessly to his sides.

“It’s not your fault,” Gabe insisted.

“You don’t know,” Justin said, digging his fingertips into his palms.

“Don’t know what?” Gabe gently prodded, and laid back down on his bed now that Justin was relatively calm.

Justin chewed on the inside of his cheek. Did he lie to Gabe, keep his tongue silent, be the pathetic coward his father said he was?

No. Gabe deserved to know the truth, even if that meant he never forgave Justin.

“It’s my fault you were shot,” Justin said, his voice shaky, but steady. “When we were, when we were attacking that first time, I-I froze, Gabe. I froze like a baby. And because I was so pathetic, you got shot, and that bastard took it out on Kellin. And maybe Kellin would have never gotten raped, and maybe he wouldn’t be dying, and you’d still have a spleen, and –”

“Stop,” Gabe said, his voice stern and demanding. “You can’t beat yourself up over this Justin.”

“But –”

“No!” Gabe snapped, his voice almost echoing in the quiet of their hospital room. “No,” he said softly. “What happened to Kellin is not your fault. That,” he said, and swallowed thickly, “That wasn’t the first time that guy raped him. Didn't you wonder why Kellin had been separated from us?”

Justin had wondered about it, but he hadn’t wanted to think about it, hadn’t wanted to believe that something so atrocious could happen to his best friend once, let alone multiple times.

“And he’s not dying because of that beating he took, it’s the infection in his wounds that’s killing him. You-you don’t know what could have happened, Justin. Maybe we could have succeeded, I don’t know, or maybe we both could have died in the struggle. We didn’t know he had a gun. But I do know that I don’t blame you for what happened, and Kellin wouldn’t want you blame yourself either.”

Justin sniffled as he felt the first tears he’d been trying so hard to hold back fall from his eyes. He rubbed his already soiled bandages across his nose. He knew what Gabe said made sense, and deep down he knew Gabe was right, but he couldn’t make himself believe it.

“You have to go see him,” Gabe pressed on. “I want to believe, too, that he’s going to make it, but if … if he doesn’t you will always regret not saying goodbye.”

Justin looked down at his bloody hands and agreed. He could no longer put this off.

He had to say goodbye.

-

The nurse cheerfully led him to the ICU, chattering inanely about her dumb cat, when all Justin wanted was for her to shut up.

“The ICU is just down that hall,” she said in her chipper voice and left him standing alone in the hallway.

He took a deep breath, and rounded the corner, stopping dead in tracks at the sight that greeted him.

Vic and Kellin’s older sister, Katy, were standing outside of the ICU. Vic hugged Katy tightly as she clutched to the fabric of the scrubs he was wearing, sobbing hysterically into Vic’s chest.

“Oh my God,” Justin said, his steps faltering. “What happened?”

Vic’s teary eyes looked up to meet his, pain written clearly all over his face.

The only thought running through Justin’s mind was that this time he had been too late.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know how much you guys missed the cliffhangers xp


	5. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time with Vic’s pov in this story. I rewrote the first part of this chapter three times. Then I rewrote it a fourth time, decided I didn’t like that version, and went back to the third revision and did a complete reedit of that. Now that it’s finally done, though, I refuse to change it again or I’ll just keep going back and forth between ideas. Hopefully, it’s not too bad. Also, I cannot believe how long this chapter got. It was supposed to be longer, but I cut the last two scenes. I decided just to make the second to last scene from Nick's pov, and the last scene will be the start of the last chapter. This story is turning out nothing like I planned. 
> 
> For clarification: Susan is Kellin’s mom, Rick is Kellin’s step-dad, Katy is Kellin’s sister, and Aunt Maria is Nick’s mother and Vic and Mike’s Aunt. Aunt Maria would also be the sister to Vic and Mike’s father, because I made Nick first cousins with Vic and Mike.
> 
> Also, thank you to firetruckyeah, colorblindbody, SavetheOwls, Madison Futch, and kellallyourfriends for your kind comments on the last chapter.

It was the crying that woke Vic from his fitful doze.

He jerked awake, hand subconsciously tightening around Kellin’s, eyes flickering to the heart monitor where a steady beat still thrummed. Kellin’s temperature had risen again, though, he worriedly noted.

His exhausted, sluggish brain wearily registered Kellin’s mother bolting to her feet, a sob falling from her lips. Without so much as a single word to Vic, she rushed to the door, her husband close behind her.

The clock on the wall read 10:13am. Three hours, he thought and bitterly huffed. Susan had made it a full three hours before breaking down crying and running from the room. Progress, he supposed. The first day, she had only made it 30 minutes and had not returned to Kellin’s bedside until the following day. Now would be no different. Vic knew he would not see her again until the next morning. 

Though, this time instead of disappearing through the door without even a glance back, she stopped and turned as if to say something to him. Perhaps an apology poised on her lips? With hooded eyes, Vic expressionlessly met her gaze and waited patiently.

Since her arrival, they had not said more than a handful of words to each other beyond a few polite greetings and a heartfelt ‘thank you for saving my baby’ attached to an awkward hug. Today, she had said nothing at all to him, not even to share the information the doctor had given her this morning about Kellin’s condition, or to explain why Vic had not been allowed a say in Kellin’s medical conditions.

He deserved answers. He deserved to know what was going on with his boyfriend. He deserved a say.

But the answers he sought remained sealed behind her perfectly painted lips.

Maybe it wasn’t entirely her fault. In the entire time he had known Kellin, the chances to talk to Kellin’s parents had been few and far between. Though Kellin did love his parents and was not estranged from them, he was not close to them either. Outside of birthdays and holidays, it was rare that Kellin talked to them, even rarer that he saw them. Vic spoke to them even less than Kellin did. In the few instances Vic did speak with them, their stilted conversations were polite, but limited to a narrow list of trite topics.

It wasn’t that Susan and her husband, Rick, weren’t good parents, necessarily, that kept Vic an arm’s length away. It’s just they had made some fairly significant mistakes in the past that Vic could not let go, not like Kellin had.  Not when he knew what those mistakes had done to Kellin.  As Kellin’s boyfriend, Vic sometimes felt it was his job to protect him, and after everything he knew about Kellin’s childhood, a small part of him felt like Kellin’s parents were people he needed to protect his boyfriend from.

See, Kellin’s mother and biological father had gotten divorced when Kellin was still very young, but his father hadn’t immediately abandoned him and his older sister like Kellin told most people he had. In fact, outside of Kellin’s immediate family, Vic was the only other person to know the truth. After a long drawn out court battle, Kellin’s father had actually _won_ full custody of both Kellin and Katy. Susan didn’t even get visitation rights. Immediately after the court had decided as such, Kellin’s father told his two young children to their faces that he did not want them, that he had never wanted them, and that he had only fought for custody to hurt their mother.

After that, Kellin’s father left his two young children alone to fend for themselves most of the time. During the times he _was_ home, he ignored the presence of his children entirely, pretending for the most part that they did not exist. It was Katy who ended up doing the best she could to take care of both of them, but there was only so much a young girl her age could do. Just trying to make sure both of them ate each day had been a nightmare. If there even was food in the house, their father would punish both of them if he caught her taking food from her own home. Oftentimes, they would not eat for days, let alone bathe, or go to school. In fact, their father kept them locked in the house so they could not leave at all. They had tried to get ahold of their mother many times with no success.

Then their mother did something Vic found completely unforgivable: she moved away. Not just a few miles, or even the next town over. No, Susan met a man online and moved over 2,000 miles away. When her children needed her the most, she up and left them for a man she had never met.

Kellin told him it wasn’t like that. He said she tried to call them, but their father prevented them from receiving the calls. He said she had called Child Protective Services on his father multiple times. He said, even after she moved away, that she never stopped trying to see them. Vic kept his thoughts on the matter to himself after that. You did whatever you could to protect your family. And you certainly did not just leave family like that, he believed, which was the reason why Vic had a sealed juvy record even though he’d never broken a law in his life.

It all came to a head when their father came home drunk one night to find food missing from the fridge and all the beer poured down the drain. Ultimately, Katy had taken drastic measures and dumped all the beer knowing it would piss off their father and force his hand in the matter. He couldn’t ignore her then if the thing he thought he needed most was gone. Long story short, Katy had ended up with a broken arm and Kellin ended up with eight stitches above his eye, a scar he still bore today. Thankfully, the neighbors had called the police when they heard screaming.

Kellin and Katy had been shipped off to their mother’s the next week.

Things had been okay for a little while after that. Their mother obviously loved them and wanted them, and their step-father had been very kind and welcoming.  But then their mother fell pregnant with the first of three kids, and Kellin and Katy – however intentional - were sort of pushed aside and ignored all over again in favor of the younger kids.

Kellin didn’t see it that way, and Vic never voiced his thoughts on it, but he believed the neglect had played a larger role in that night on the bridge than Kellin had admitted when he told Vic about it.

Vic knew Susan and Rick loved Kellin very much. They had, after all, dropped everything to fly here, leaving their three youngest children in the care of Rick’s sister.

But sometimes love just wasn’t enough. And Vic never quite believed they had done their best by Kellin and Katy, that they didn’t chose to ignore that Kellin and Katy were hurting instead of getting them help, that they couldn’t have tried harder then _and_ now. And while it may be true that Vic certainly never went out of his way to speak to either of them, they were not exactly trying either.

So Vic never really had much to say to Susan, Kellin never really asked him to try harder, and they simply left it at that.

Instead of giving Vic the answers he deserved, Susan shook her head sadly and walked away. The door clicked shut behind her husband whose feet might as well have been attached to her heels. As soon as the door shut, Vic felt his shoulders relax. He leaned back further into the recliner one of the nurses had dragged in for him, and turned his eyes towards Kellin, watching his chest rise and fall rhythmically.

Unaware that he had dozed off, Vic jerked awake again when something plopped into his lap. The smell of greasy food immediately assaulted his nose. Vic looked up blearily at Mike as his younger brother handed him a bottle of water and sat in the seat opposite him.

Vic eyed his brother warily as he hesitantly accepted the bottle of water. There was no pretense this time, no ‘Vic, you need to eat real food,’ before his brother ultimately gave up and handed him the bag of food he had brought with him. There was no ‘Vic, you need real sleep,’ or ‘Vic, you need a break,’ or ‘Vic, I’m worried about you.’ There was nothing, nothing at all.

It was very, very suspicious.

But he was too exhausted to call Mike out on it, too exhausted to argue, too tired to coax out of his brother whatever cockamamie scheme Mike had planned using methods Vic had perfected over the years to prevent Mike from doing anything stupid, like getting them both arrested … again. And he was too tired to explain to Mike that he just could not leave. In the first few days, he had left this room a few times when Mike forced him to get food or if someone needed a moment alone with Kellin. But he refused to go far, and as Kellin’s temperature incrementally increased, and he labored harder and harder for each breath, and the doctor’s faces turned grim, Vic had taken to refusing to leave at all.

He could not leave and risk coming back to find the worst had happened while he was not there. He just couldn’t.

Mike even said nothing when Vic sipped the water, but set the food aside after only a few bites, feeling queasy and not at all hungry in the least, especially not for crap fast food.

“Get some sleep, bro. I know you stay up all night,” was all Mike said with a gentle smile. “I’ll watch over Kellin for you. I’ll let you know the second anything changes.”

Vic wanted to argue, but after a few minutes of staring at Mike’s feigned innocent look, Vic felt his eyelids slip shut and passed out again.

If that fucker drugged his water, Vic was going to set fire to his favorite set of drums. 

He woke sometime later to the hushed tones of two people talking. Without opening his eyes, he could not tell who it was. At this point, it really could be anyone.

Only two other visitors were allowed besides Vic at any given moment. The hospital had already bent quite a few rules for them, like letting Vic stay 24/7 and ignoring the fact that he both ate and drank in the ICU though both were expressly prohibited, but this they were adamant on. There was some sort of schedule, he assumed, that Kellin’s friends and family visited according to. Kellin’s parents always came in the morning, Mike always came at lunch to lecture him about taking better care of himself, and Katy always came after dinner and stayed until morning. Between lunch and dinner, however, Vic could never guess who would come. Mostly, it was Vic’s parents or Nick and/or Jack. But a few days ago, Vic had been shocked to see Matty Mullins and Jesse Lawson walk through the door together. Matty had flown in on his day off of touring for a few hours, but had had to leave again shortly after arriving to meet back up with his band. Jesse had stayed for two days, but he, too, had had to return home. Vic appreciated that they had come at all, and he knew Kellin would, too.

He rubbed his eyes and the two blurry figures in the room solidified. “Mom? Dad?” he croaked.

“Didn’t mean to wake you, son,” his father said with a gentle smile.

“We were just leaving, sweetheart. Katy’s just arrived,” his mother added.

“I slept the entire time you were here?” he asked. According to the clock, he’d slept almost 4 hours. That was the most sleep he’d gotten since Kellin went missing. He generally found he could not sleep more than an hour or two at a time before he would jerk awake with an awful feeling that something horrible had happened. His frown deepened. “Mike drugged me, didn’t he?”

“You’ll have to take that up with your brother,” his mother said, and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. “We’ll be back. Please, please take care of yourself, sweetheart.”

Vic swallowed his sarcastic retort, and nodded instead. What was the point in taking better care of himself if his reason for doing so was lying in a hospital bed, his life slipping through Vic’s fingers like water no matter how hard Vic tried to hold on?

His expression softened as his mother pressed a kiss to Kellin’s forehead and brushed his hair from his forehead. She whispered something to Kellin too soft for Vic to hear, before taking his father’s hand and walking out the door.

“Hey,” Katy said, bursting through the door looking as tired and disheveled as Vic felt. Her dark brown hair was thrown messily into a bun, dark bags lining her red rimmed eyes, and wrinkled clothes hanging from her frame. She wore the same sweat pants yesterday, but Vic couldn’t really blame her. The only reason he wasn’t still wearing scrubs was because Mike had gone out and bought him some clothes and brought them to the ICU. He had been wearing the same outfit for three days now. “I brought you dinner and some magazines to read.”

“Thanks,” he groggily croaked and accepted the bag, though he still wasn’t hungry in the least.

“Has he woken up at all?” Katy asked, a small spark of hope in her eyes.

Vic hated to be the one to kill that spark as he shook his head no.

Out of everyone who came to visit Kellin, Katy probably understood the most how he felt. Her and Kellin were extremely close; they had to be almost out of necessity. When living with their father, they had only the other to rely on. Even after moving in with their mother, they still felt like they could only trust and rely on each other.

They almost slipped away from one another, in high school when the weight of their childhood issues clashed with the angst of being a teenager leading them both down a self-destructive path.  While Kellin had become depressed and withdrawn and had taken solace in music, Katy had taken to excessively partying when she wasn’t at school or at her part-time job. She came home drunk often, leaving Kellin to take care of her, pick up her mess, and cover for her.

Despite all that, when Kellin found himself on a bridge ledge one dark lonely night, Katy had still been the first person he called. She had been too drunk to answer her phone.

Kellin decided not to tell her what happened. It was Justin who accidentally spilled the beans to her a week later, thinking she already knew because of how close the two siblings were.

Realizing she could have missed the most important call of her life, _and_ that she was turning into their father, Katy had broken down and finally gotten help to overcome her drinking problem and the trauma of what their father had done to her. She had also been the one who encouraged Kellin to seek professional help, too. Kellin and Katy still believe that had been sneaky about it and had managed to conceal Katy’s problems expertly from their parents. Vic believed that just like they had done the rest of Katy and Kellin’s life, their parents turned the other cheek and chose to ignore it.

Like her younger brother, Katy was an absolute sweetheart, and Vic already loved her like she was his own sister. Watching the devastation splay across her features each night when she came and realized that Kellin had only gotten worse instead of better was just as painful as going through it himself.

“Do you want the recliner tonight?” he asked, watching as she shifted around in the hospital chair, trying to find a comfortable position.

“No, thanks. I slept some at the hotel. Plus, with your arm in that sling, this chair can’t be too comfortable,” she said, pulling her seat as close to Kellin’s bed as possible. She curled up, her legs folded awkwardly under her. “You should get some more sleep, though. You look exhausted.”

“Have you been talking to my brother?” he said with a wry smile, surprising a small chuckle out of Katy.

“No, I swear we’re not ganging up on you. Yet,” she added, though Vic knew it was an empty threat. Katy was probably the only person here who would never try to force him to leave Kellin’s side.

Mindful of the IV in the back of his hand, Katy slipped her hand into Kellin’s. She rested both elbows on the edge of the bed, leaning as close to her brother as she dared.

“Vic? Can I … Can I ask you something?” Katy said after some time.

“Of course, anything,” he said, though something about the way she couldn’t look at him set his nerves on edge. 

“What … what was it like, you know, down there?” she asked after a moment’s hesitation, her eyes briefly flicking towards his direction. “I,I just want to know what he went through,” she quietly added.

This time, it was Vic who could not meet her eyes. “I don’t think that’s something I should tell you.” The labyrinth would haunt his dreams forever. There was no reason it should haunt anyone else’s.

She sighed heavily and fell silent, eyes transfixed on her brother, grip tightening around his hand. Vic thought the subject dropped, at least for the moment, until she snapped straight up. With a sense of urgency, she said, “Vic –”

“Katy,” he cut her off. “I don’t –”

“No, Vic, something’s wrong,” she said.

Taking notice, he didn’t need to ask what. Kellin’s whole body had gone rigid, his heart monitor beating faster than usual and climbing steadily faster, and blood pressure through the roof. 

They both jumped to their feet when his heart rate plummeted, an alarm on the monitor blaring to life. They could do nothing, but watch in horror as Kellin began to convulse. 

The door burst open, a few nurses and Dr. Caito - Kellin’s primary doctor since being admitted - rushed through the door with a bunch of strange looking equipment.

“You need to leave,” one of the nurses said, ushering them out the door quickly.

“What’s going on? What’s happening?” Vic asked.

The nurse’s face remained expressionless as she guided them out of the room and shut it behind her.

Vic stood frozen, staring at the barrier blocking him from Kellin, until a sharp gasp and broken sob spurred him to motion. He wrapped his arms around Katy’s shaking body, letting her bury her face into his shirt.

“He’s going to be okay. He has to be okay,” she said over and over again between sobs.

Vic said nothing in response. He felt numb and disconnected from his body. This couldn’t be happening. It had to be a dream, right? Just another horrible nightmare.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Justin approaching.

“Oh my God,” Justin said, his steps faltering. “What happened?”

“Kellin had a seizure,” Vic managed to say.

Justin’s faced paled to the color or paper. “Why? Is he …?”

Is he dying, was he going to ask? Is he going to make it? Is he ever going to be okay? Is he … dead already?

The question did not matter. The answer was the same.

“I don’t know,” Vic said, feeling tears prick his eyes. He tightened his arms around Katy, her hands fisting in the back of his shirt.

They collapsed into seats in the waiting room, Katy clutching his hand like a life line. Justin shifted restlessly in the seat opposite from him. At some point, Nick showed up with Jack and Mike. His brother took the seat next to him, offering his silent comfort. How they knew something had happened, he didn’t ask. None of them dared break the silence that had settled over them like a chemical warfare agent. 

Minutes, hours, an eternity later, the door to the ICU finally opened again.

Katy noticed first, springing to her feet the moment Dr. Caito stepped out into the hallway. The rest of them followed suit. “Is he okay?” she asked.

“He’s stable,” Dr. Caito assured. Vic couldn’t help but feel like there was a silent ‘for now’ attached to the end of that statement.

“What happened? Why did he start seizing like that?” Katy insisted.

“His fever spiked, and it is not uncommon for a person to experience convulsions when that happens.” 

“How high was it?” Nick asked.

“It shot up past 105, but we’ve managed to lower it back down to 104,” Dr. Caito said like that was some sort of accomplishment. It did not seem all that reassuring to Vic.

“What now?” Vic softly asked the question he knew they were all dreading.

“I spoke earlier with Kellin’s parents about a course of treatment in the event of a worst case scenario, and they gave me permission to proceed. Unfortunately, I believe we’ve reached that moment and I’ve begun treatment. Did Mr. and Mrs. Bostwick pass along the information?”

Katy nodded immediately, but Vic and the rest of them shook their heads no. Maybe they had talked about it, Vic didn’t really know. He vaguely recalled the Doctor mentioning something about an induced coma, perhaps, but not much else. At this point, he couldn’t really tell much of anything anymore. Katy shot him a confused look when he said no.

“Okay,” Dr. Caito said, taking in their answers. “As you all know, Kellin’s body has been working really hard to fight the infection, but unfortunately he’s losing ground quickly and not making any progress. Basically, Kellin’s immune system has gone into overdrive and it’s putting a lot of stress on his body and organs. To relieve some of that stress and give his vital organs a rest, we’ve placed Kellin in an induced coma. This will slow down some of his internal mechanisms and hopefully allow his body to stop struggling so hard just to function and focus all its energy into fighting the infection. Now I’m going to allow all of you in there for a few minutes to see Kellin, but I think you need to be prepared for what you might see,” Dr. Caito paused, and searched their faces. “Patients placed in an induced coma cannot breathe on their own, so we’ve had to place Kellin on a ventilator. It may be a bit of a shock to see the first time. We’ve also had to pack ice around his body to get his temperature down. No matter how cold you may think Kellin is, you cannot put a blanket over him. Even a thin blanket might force his temperature up again.”

Katy’s hand blindly reached towards him. Vic grabbed her hand and wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her closer. What the doctor said hadn’t quite sunk it, but he knew the second they walked into the ICU it would hit them all like a brick to the face.

“I know all of this seems quite scary at the moment, but did Mr. and Mrs. Bostwick pass along the information I gave them this morning?” Dr. Caito asked. Again, only Katy nodded her head, her brows furrowing when Vic once more said no. “Okay. Well, the good news is the lab identified the bacteria causing the infection. Though there is no guarantee, the survival rate of bloodstream infections with this particular bacteria are quite high. We’ve switched his medications accordingly, and we should know in a few days how he is responding to them. Does everyone understand what I’m saying?” the doctor asked.

Vic heard the words, but did not understand. Words like seizures, and temperatures over 105, and ventilator did not correlate with ‘optimistic about his chances.’  How could his chances be good when he could not even breath on his own?

“Everyone can go in for a few minutes, but then I’ll have to insist you return to no more than two people and Vic. Any questions before I let you see Kellin?” 

They all shook their heads no. Everyone followed Katy into the room. Though eager to see his boyfriend to see for himself that Kellin was still alive, Vic felt terrified. What would they see exactly when Katy shakily reached out and pulled back the curtain around Kellin’s bed?

No matter what the doctor told them, nothing could prepare them for the shock. The reassuring beat on the heart monitor clashed with the mechanical rise and fall of Kellin's chest aided entirely by the tube shoved down his throat and the machine it was attached to.

Just looking at it, Vic felt like he was chocking. The room suddenly felt too small, too stuffy. He felt like he was locked in a small box, the oxygen quickly running out as the box grew smaller and smaller, the walls crashing in around him. Mike’s hands were on his shoulders, but he seemed farther away than the moon. Numbly, he watched Katy burst into tears again and latch onto the nearest person, Justin.

“It’s going to be okay,” Justin said, enveloping her in a hug.

_How,_ he thought. How could he say those words so casually when no one could predict if they were true?

Without another thought, his feet turned and fled the room.

Somehow, he ended up in the bathroom down the hall trapped in a stall, knees drawn to his chest, body shaking uncontrollably. The stall door pushed open ajar, Mike appearing through the slit.

“Oh Vic,” Mike sadly said, pushing his tall, lithe body into the stall with him and sliding down to the floor, as well.

“This is so fucked,” Vic said, burying his face in his hands. “This is so fucked. Kellin is … And his parents won’t even tell me what’s going on. Katy comes in every night and cries and it breaks my heart. And I can’t … I don’t know what to do. Did I do the wrong thing? Did I make a mistake by going after him? I risked _your life._ I risked Tony and Jaime’s lives, and Kellin might not even make it. Katy might have to slowly watch her brother _die_ now, andKellin might –”

“Vic, stop,” Mike said sternly, pulling Vic’s hands away from his face and dragging him into a hug. “Firstly, you did not risk our lives. Tony, Jaime, and I knew what we were getting into, Vic. _We_ risked our lives because we wanted to help, because we wanted to save our friends, too. And you know what? The five mothers who have hugged me, and thanked me, and cried on me in the last few days says risking my life was pretty damn worth it. And even if Kellin doesn't make it, then he won't die in a prison, but surrounded by people who love and care for him, and his family and friends will have gotten a chance to say goodbye. That will _never_ be a mistake. You would see that if you hadn’t run yourself ragged these last few weeks.”

“You’re right. I know, you’re right. I don’t know why I said that. I don’t …”

“You’re not thinking clearly because you’re exhausted, Vic. You need sleep and you need real food,” Mike said, rubbing his back as Vic finally began to relax in his arms. “Now, Aunt Maria has once again magically found a kitchen and is bringing us all a home cooked meal that we’re going to sneak in and eat in Gabe’s room tomorrow. _You_ are going to be there. But for tonight, I’ve arranged with the nurses to let you use the doctor’s lounge to take a shower and a long ass nap.”

“No,” Vic resolutely refused. “I can’t leave him. What it something happens again and I’m not there? What if –”

“I will sit with Kellin tonight while you are sleeping, okay? Mama and Papa are going to sit with him while we eat the meal Aunt Maria is bringing. We will tell you if anything happens. If he so much as twitches, or if his temp so much as increases or decreases just one tenth, I will wake you up immediately. Okay? You have to take care of yourself, Vic, not just for you, but so that you can keep being there for Kellin, too.”

Vic reluctantly nodded against his brother’s shoulder. As much as he hated to admit it, he couldn’t keep this up anymore. No part of him wanted to leave Kellin for even a second, but if he continued to neglect his needs, he would not be able to sit with Kellin like he had and not collapse.

“You promise you’ll wake me up the second anything happens?”

Mike offered his middle finger like a pinky promise, like they used to do as teenagers because Mike thought it would be funny. Vic linked their middle fingers. “I promise,” Mike said. “Let’s get you off the floor. We’ll stop at the ICU first so you can see Kellin, and then it’s into the shower. I already bought you new clothes.”

Vic let Mike heft him to his feet and wrap an arm around his shoulders, leading him blindly from the bathroom.

“Mike, thanks. Not just for –”

“I know, bro,” Mike said, squeezing his shoulder. “I know.”

 

*

Though panic thrummed through his veins like a semi on a highway, and the thought that something truly terrible and irreversible would happen simply because he was no longer in the room nagged him like a forgotten memory, Vic fell asleep the second his head hit the cot in the doctor’s lounge.

He woke up six hours later still exhausted, but his head felt clearer and less panicked.

He trusted Mike with his life, and he also trusted his brother with Kellin’s life, as well. He knew his brother would never lie to him and would have woken him up if something terrible had happened, but he still rushed from the doctor’s lounge, ran up the three flights of stairs to the ICU, and stopped just short of bursting through the ICU doors. Calmly, he walked inside.

Kellin’s body was still packed in ice, the ventilator still jammed down his throat. Though he had seen it already, it still hit him in the gut like a punch from the Hulk.

Mike peered at him over the magazine he’d been reading. “Nothing’s changed. I’m sorry.”

“No news is good news,” Vic mumbled in response.

As he rose from the recliner and let Vic take his seat beside Kellin once more, Mike’s eyes softened with sympathy. Vic pointedly ignored it. 

“Do you want me to stay the rest of the night?” Mike asked.

“No,” Katy surprisingly said with a tight smile. “We’ll take it from here.”

“All right. I’ll come get you when Aunt Maria gets here,” Mike said. He squeezed Vic’s shoulder in comfort on the way out the door.

“What is it?” Vic asked when he heard the door click shut. For whatever reason, Katy had wanted Mike gone.

“Have my parents really not told you anything about what’s going on?” Katy asked.

“No,” Vic said, slipping his hand into Kellin’s again. The most important person in his life, and he did not even get to add his input on their fate. “We don’t exactly talk much."

“Still, that’s messed up. They should have told you,” Katy said what he had been thinking. “I’ll talk to them in the morning.”

“Thank you,” he said and offered her a grateful.  

She nodded, and said nothing more until morning.


	6. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is another short-ish, half-ish chapter. I am probably going to condense Jack's part, though, and add it to the beginning of the next chapter due to a lack of motivation to write Jack's part and a strong desire to get to the final chapter, which I am extra excited about. Also, Mike will no longer be appearing in this story. If you've heard the news, then you know why I have come to this decision. If you want a further explanation on my thought process that led to this decision, I am willing to provide one. However, this does not affect this story whatsoever. I am committed to finishing it and I still love SWS and Kellic. You may have also noticed that I posted another story featuring Mike as the main character, that I have since taken down. I don't know what I am going to do with it yet, but I may rewrite the part for a different person, possibly Tony, and then repost it at a later date. 
> 
> Also, if you live in the US, we have a very slim chance of still defeating this Tax Scam Bill that recently passed. Please, please consider calling your House representative and Senator if they are Republican and telling them they must vote 'no' when the scam bill goes through the house and senate again. Also, while you are on the phone with your shitty Republican Senator, tell them they have to vote no on dissolving net neutrality, or you can kiss the internet as you know it goodbye. This is very important. Also, if you will be 18 or over by election day 2018, make sure you register to vote, and then go out and vote! Your vote matters, and if enough young people actually got out and voted we could turn the tide on corrupt Republicans.

“Jack –”

“I’m fine.”

“The doctor said –”

“I know.”

“Okay,” Nick said, swallowing his sigh. In silence, they walked away from physical therapy, Nick steering a robotic Jack like a grocery store cart with a squeaky wheel that could not roll straight. Nick had purposefully schedule his PT at the same time as Jack’s, wanting to be there to help if things did not go as planned. Turned out, Nick wasn’t much help at all. He was nothing more than a fly on the wall to Jack’s depression.

Jack walked with his head down, broken arm cradled in his good hand, as if that would somehow make it work again. So caught up in his thoughts, he did not even realize that Nick was not leading him back to his room, but to someone he hoped could help lift Jack’s spirits, if only for a moment.

“This isn’t my room,” Jack said when Nick stopped in front of Gabe and Justin’s hospital room.

“I know. There’s a surprise in there,” Nick said, hoping what waited inside might brighten not just Jack’s disheartened spirits, but Gabe and Justin’s, as well.

“What kind of surprise?” Jack skeptically asked.

“The good kind,” Nick assured, and pushed the door open, ushering Jack inside.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Jesse Lawson volubly said with a welcoming smirk. “Maybe we should throw it back out,” he stage-whispered to Gabe and Justin, causing them both to chuckle.

“Don’t make me laugh, it hurts,” Gabe laughed.  

“Fuck you, too, asshole,” Jack said, though the mirth on his face spoke volumes of how happy he was to see his old friend. This was exactly why Nick wanted to bring Jack here, and why he was so glad Jesse had come to visit. The four of them were walking on eggshells around each other, didn’t know how to act normally outside of their prison. But Jesse knew Justin, Jack, and Gabe, knew who they used to be, and knew how to treat them as the people they were, not simply as the victims they had become.  A little bit of normalcy for them when they were all reaching out, grasping onto whatever little bit of normality and sanity they could find in the air around them. “What are you doing here?”

“Wow, Jack, great to see you, too.”

“That’s not what I –”

“I know, I was teasing. I,” Jesse said, his expression turned somber. “I was pretty devastated when you guys went missing. As soon as the news hit that you had returned, I called pretty much everyone we know to find you until I got a hold of Jaime. He told me where you were, and I came as soon as I could. Unfortunately, I can only stay for a few days, though.”

“Hey, you came. That’s what matters,” Gabe offered.

“Hell yeah,” Jack agreed, shuffling forward and parking himself in the seat next to Jesse. Nick stayed back by the door, keeping out of the way as much as possible. “It’s good to see you, man.”

“Missed you guys, too,” Jesse said, throwing an arm around Jack’s shoulder. “Really, though, I had to come see you guys and see for myself that you were okay. Plus, if anything can get Kellin out of that bed, it’s me.”

“How do you figure that?” Justin asked.

“Because, you know Kellin would rise from the dead just to annoy me, or to make a ginger joke at my expense,” Jesse said with confidence.

Nick slipped out of the room just as the sound of their laughter rang out.

“Hey,” Jaime’s familiar voice rang out startling him. He spun around to see Jaime and Tony approaching Justin and Gabe’s room.

“Hey. Haven’t seen you guys in a bit. How’s your arm?” Nick asked, vaguely recalling the last time he saw Jaime was the day they’d been rescued. Jaime had been in the ER getting stiches on a wound in his arm in the room next to Nick.  

“It’s just a scratch,” Jaime assured, flexing his arm like a body builder on 10 tons of steroids.

“He passed out in the ER while getting stitches,” Tony chimed in.

“Lies,” Jaime insisted. “How are you? Why are you out here in the hallway?”

“Yo, is that Jaime Preciado I hear out there?” Jesse called out from the room, filling what would otherwise have been an awkward silence.

“You know it!” Jaime said, and instantly spun around to waltz into the room, all but forgetting Nick’s presence.

Nick sighed in relief, thankful for Jaime’s ADHD, as Tony gave him an apologetic smile and followed Jaime. Are you okay was not a question Nick was ready to answer yet.  

He stayed outside the door while his friends talked. He wished he could share in their laughter, but he did not know Jesse like they did, and it did not feel right. Nick was glad for a moment his friends could forget the horror surrounding them, but he also knew that it would not last, that it could not last.

He would do anything to make it last, to make his friends happy and whole and healthy again, however impossible that seemed right now with the fate of Kellin and Jack still hanging in the balance.

There was one thing that Nick knew for sure, though, and that was he would not stop trying until recovery seemed possible for _all_ of them.

*

“So what do you think, Ma? Remember the time my old band and I broke down in the middle of nowhere Arizona, and you happened to have like a 10th cousin who took us in for the night? You’ve got to know someone in the area,” Nick pleaded with his mother. Just like Nick thought they would, spirits had dampened somewhat again, but Nick had a plan to bring them back up. Gabe had gotten the okay from the doctor to start eating real food again, and so Nick thought a home cooked meal – their first in weeks – might bring a little comfort. With his mother’s excellent cooking skills and vast network of friends and family that seemed to extend to every corner of the world, she had to know someone that would be willing to lend their kitchen to them for a day.

“I may know someone –”

“That’s great! I’ll go tell the guys.”

“Wait, mijo,” his mother said, using her ‘I’m your mother and you’re going to listen to what I have to say right now,’ voice. “Sit.”

Nick immediately sat on the edge of the closest bed.  

“You want to tell me what this is really about?” his mother asked, sitting down next to him.

“What?” Nick said, looking away to stare out the window at the drab, concrete building next door. “I just thought it’d be nice to provide a nice home cooked meal for everyone. We haven’t had real food in weeks. Hospital food doesn’t count, you know?” he rambled on, only stopping when his mother placed her hand on his, preventing him from picking at the hem of his shirt.

“Mijo, don’t lie to me,” she chided softly, curling her hand around his. “Tell me the truth.”

“It’s just,” he said, shrugging off his mother’s hand to stand and pace the room. He couldn’t lie to his mother, but he could not look her in the eyes and tell her the truth either. “Justin is missing all of his fingernails and they won’t grow back for weeks, and his eye is so damaged he might lose part of his sight. Jack may never use his hand again. Gabe is missing his spleen, and may have to take drugs for the rest of his life. Kellin might actually … He might die. And what do I have? A few cuts and a dislocated shoulder. I’m the only one not severely injured. I’m the only one not facing any long-term or permanent injuries. I … I have to be there for them. I have to help! I’m the only one who can.”

“Oh mijo,” she said, her voiced laced with such pity that Nick despised it. “I know what this is, and this is not your fault. It’s not your fault your friends were hurt. What you are feeling is survivor’s guilt, but – ”

“No,” Nick vehemently denied. “No, it’s not survivor’s guilt. It _is_ my fault. It was _my_ idea to escape, and it failed. It failed, Mama, and Justin and Kellin almost got beaten to death because of it. But if I had been paying attention we could have escaped earlier. We could have gotten out of there before Kellin got that beating that tore his back to shreds and probably gave him the infection. We could have escaped before Jack lost feeling in his arm. And then maybe Gabe would have never gotten shot, and Justin would have never gotten cracked in the face with that lead pipe. And maybe Kellin wouldn’t be dying,” Nick said. He felt his chest tighten and the pressure build behind his eyes as he gasped for breath.

His mother rose to her feet, hands on her hips. “Nicholas Anthony Martin, this is not your fault,” his mother sternly said. “You are not the one who kidnapped your friends, you are not the one who harmed your friends, and you are not responsible for their injuries. Yes, your friends are gravely injured, but,” she said, putting a hand under his chin and forcing Nick to look at her, “Just because someone’s pain is worse than yours, does _not_ mean your pain does not matter. You cannot put this on your shoulders, child. Yes, you must face what happened to you and your friends in that prison, but you cannot torture yourself with the what ifs and the maybes as you do so. Those are not reality. And the reality is there are sick and twisted people in this world who do horrible things to others. It’s a difficult thing to accept in any situation, this _evil_ and our powerlessness to stop it, but sometimes, no matter how prepared we think we might be, we cannot prevent the horrible things from happening. This … this is not on you, mijo.”

“I just,” he said, collapsing back onto the bed. “I just want my friends to be okay. I want Gabe to have a spleen, and Jack to be able to move his hand, and Kellin to not be in the ICU. And it sucks that I have no control over what happens to any of them. I just … I just want to help them any way I can.”

“And that is fine, but,” she said, sitting next to him and taking his hand once more. “You can’t help them at your expense either. You must take care of yourself first, before you can be there for them.”

*

“Thanks for not being weird about this,” Nick said to Jesse a few days later as he drove him to the airport. Jaime and Tony had offered to drive Jesse, as well, but Nick insisted. Nick _needed_ to take him. He had to be busy, and useful, and doing something, because he absolutely could not just sit at the hospital or the hotel waiting, hoping, praying for something good to happen for once.

His mothers words hung to him like mist in the air after a heavy rain, but though his mind knew his mother was right, his heart believed he could have done more. You always believe that when you confront evil face to face that you can  succeed, because that is what all the movies and the books make you believe. But in reality, it’s much different. In reality, sometimes you are the mercy of evil and there's nothing you can do to change that.. Though logically you know it’s true, it’s still a harsh pill to swallow, an impossible idea to wrap your mind around, and even harder for your heart to believe.

So Nick kept busy so he did not have to think about it.

“Why would this be weird?” Jesse asked. Nick glanced sideways at Jesse briefly before returning back to the traffic in front of him. “Oh, you mean because you replaced me in the band?”

“Yeah,” Nick barely more than sighed.

“Look, some days I do regret leaving more than others, but that’s got nothing to do with you. I’m happy where I am now, and I’m glad that the person who replaced me is as talented and kind as you are.”

“Thanks,” Nick awkwardly said, feeling a tingle of anxiety worm its way down his spine and into his toes, which shook on the pedals. “If it’s … any consolation, it took them a long time to make me an official member. I’m pretty sure for the first six months, Kellin thought you and the rest of the band were playing some sort of joke on him, and that you were going to show up one day and yell ‘suprise.’”

“Yeah, for someone who decided to be in a very transient career, Kellin doesn’t handle change very well.”

“I’m not sure any of us do.”  

They both fell silent as Nick took the exit for the airport, the heavy traffic finally relenting.

As Nick pulled up to the airport, with a serious voice, Jesse said, “Listen, I just want to thank you. The guys said they wouldn’t have made it out alive without you. So thank you, sincerely, for bringing my boys home alive.”

Nick shrugged awkwardly in response for he did not know how to respond. He could not reply with ‘you’re welcome’ as he did not feel he deserved a thank you. There was still a small voice in his head that screamed ‘you could have done more!’ And though for the time being everyone was still alive, there was no guarantee it would remain that way. At any moment, the pieces of themselves they’d slowly, but determinedly, put together over the last week or so of recovery could shatter irreparably, and they would never even come close to being the same person they once were again.  

So he mumbled something incoherently in response to Jesse, and waved him off, hoping he could return soon. 

Minutes after returning to the hospital, on his way to escort Jack to their second PT session, the text from Justin came.

_KQ had a seizure. Kicked out of room. Don’t know if he’s okay._

He couldn’t help but wonder, if this was the moment it all fell apart for good.

**

His mother made enchiladas. Compared to the crap they’d eaten over the last few weeks, the enchiladas were like a cold bottle of Gatorade after a tough workout, or a slice of chocolate cake after eating gross mushy beans straight out of a can.

In the labyrinth, when Kellin fell silent after what he now knew to be a brutal beating, his belief that they could all escape alive had wavered. And in those moments, he had wondered if he would ever taste his mother’s cooking again while surrounded by the people he loved most.

“Mmmmh, this amazing, Mrs. Martin,” Jaime said. “Just as good as my abuelita’s. Don’t tell her I said that.”

“Why thank you, Jaime. That’s very kind of you,” his mother said, bristling with pride. She may have resisted the idea at first of making this meal, but Nick knew how much she loved cooking for people and showing off her skills.

Surprisingly, the food did help to warm some of the parts of him iced by the labyrinth. It felt normal, it felt like home, it felt like love and family, and all the things he thought he’d never get to have again.

But at the same time, he couldn’t help letting his eyes wonder over to the place Vic could not pry his eyes from: the empty space next to Vic where Kellin should have been.

He was not the only one to notice. They all felt the absence as deeply they would a lost limb.

Nick was not aware he had started crying, until Tony placed a hand on his left shoulder and his mother took his right hand.

“The doctors said he’s responding to the new medicine,” Justin murmured.

“That’s good,” Gabe said.

“We should pray,” his mother suddenly said in the silence that followed.

“Mama, we … most of us do not believe in God,” Nick softly said.

“It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t exist,” Justin muttered under his breath from beside him.

“But Kellin does,” his Aunt said. “And I think he would appreciate it if we prayed now.”

There was a mummer of assent, and out of respect the others bowed their heads as his mother prayed. Nick did not, and when looked across the table, he caught the gaze of Vic who did not bow his head either. 

Though impossible, even if by some miracle it could heal Kellin’s physical wounds, no amount of praying was ever going to make him, or any of them, whole again.

But maybe there was something that could. As he looked around the room, at all his friends, his brothers, they were all holding hands or clasping shoulders, each coming together to support each other, and pray together, though none of them believed. Maybe together they _did_ had the strength to move on. Maybe, as in the Labyrinth, they did have the power to succeed _together,_ as one, as a family.

And just maybe, together, one day, they wouldn’t all be so sad anymore.  


	7. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the shortest chapter I've written in years. But I wanted to post something to prove I'm still working on this story and to tide you wonderful peeps over until I can finish the rest. Thank you for your patience. I appreciate it. :) I think this chapter more than the others requires a bit of reading between the lines.

Jack stared down at the caskets of his crew, his friends. They were allowed a minute alone with the remains before each were shipped back home to their families. It would be their only chance to stay goodbye. With Kellin’s life still hanging in the balance, they were reluctant to leave to attend the funerals. Even if they could, each of the bodies were headed to a different place. It would be impossible to attend every one no matter how much he wanted to.

Jack rested his hand on the closest casket: Steve’s.

Steve had been his guitar tech, his friend, his trusted confidant since Sleeping With Sirens had started making enough money to be able to hire a tech. Steve was just one of a few people Jack trusted enough to hold some of his most prized possessions.

Now, he was just … gone. And for what? For what purpose? For what reason? Why?

He watched as they placed Steve’s and the rest of the crew’s body in hearses headed for the airport. Even after the doors closed, and the vehicles drove away from the hospital, Jack stood still, watching them disappear into the distance.

A hand placed carefully on his shoulder startled him.

“Let’s go back inside,” Nick said, his eyes puffy and red.

“Just a minute. I just need a minute.”

Nick nodded and wheeled Gabe back into the hospital. Justin squeezed his arm briefly as he passed him by, leaving Jack alone.

He stood there for a long time, watching the sun set in the distance, torn between being grateful he got to see the sun set again and wondering why he got this chance when so many this night did not.

**

The next day Jack found himself in the same exact spot just before the break of dawn. The sun rose behind him, hidden beyond the building, but he listened as the birds awoke from their slumber and watched as the shadpws slipped away.

It was quiet in this town. Much quieter than the city he grew up in, and the places they played shows in night after night. Quiet enough to hear his thoughts.

Jack didn’t much care for it. For in the silence, he could hear the _drip, drip, drip_ of a leaky faucet, the rustle of cloth and skin scraping against concrete, and the echo of screams down barren hallways.

He leaned against the brick walls of the hospital, half hidden beneath an overgrown azalea bush, and closed his eyes for just a moment.

“I knew I’d find you here,” a voice, Nick’s voice, startled him. “It’s almost time for physical therapy.”

Jack acknowledged him with a slight nod of his head, and looked up at the older man. Nick had his face turned towards the sun, eyes closed, as a slight breeze rustled his clothes. He looked serene, peaceful, but the bags under his eyes told a different story.

“It’s not our fault what happened to them,” Jack said, gesturing to where he’d watched the hearses carry off his friends the night before. “We couldn’t have saved them.”

“I know,” Nick softly said, stuffing his hand into his pocket.

“Nothing that happened down there was our fault.”

Nick fell silent for a moment, his shoulders hunched as he kicked a pebble across the path like a chastised child. “We have to go or we’re gonna be late for PT,” Nick finally said.

“Okay,” Jack said.

But he thought, _Maybe._ _Maybe another day._

**

Jack walked towards PT with Nick much like a child on their first day of school: maybe a little bit petulant, and maybe a little bit scared all his efforts would be wasted.

His first PT session had yielded no results, and while the physical therapist said that was normal, that he was not going to magically regain control over his fingers in one day, Jack did not dare to hope. He had to believe this was permanent, because wishes were too painful and not for people like him.

Not even the news that Kellin, though condition still precarious, had improved immensely over the last few days leading the doctors to be ‘cautiously optimistic’ of his chances, could lift Jack’s near dead spirits.

He was about to enter PT when Nick’s palm rested flat against the door, pushing it shut.

“What are you doing?”

“Jack … You know whatever happens here … it doesn’t matter. We’d wait for you, forever, if we have to.”

 _I know,_ he wanted to say, but couldn’t, because he didn’t. Though irrational, it had crossed his mind that everyone would move on without him and he would be left behind with a deformed hand and broken dreams. It was a silly thought to have, but Nick’s reassurances did help. 

“We’re in this together. Then, now, and to the end,” Nick said, finally stepping aside and letting Jack in.

“Thanks,” he quietly responded.

"No one gets left behind." 

**

With the grief still too near, his focused wandered from his PT session. He performed each exercise methodically, and though he registered the pain, and the slight pleased smirk of his physical therapist, the implications did not really settle in his brain. Not until much later.

After, he found himself outside of the ICU, a place he felt he should have visited far more than he had.

But seeing Kellin lying on that hospital bed brought flashes of images of Kellin lying on far too similar of a bed and memories of violence still too raw and painful to confront.

He stood at the door of the ICU far too long, trying to find the courage to just walk in, when a whimper and the rustle of cloth drew him away from having to decide.

He followed the noise, and was surprised to find Justin curled up on the hospital chairs of the ICU waiting room and somehow fast asleep.

“Justin,” he almost whispered, knowing after everything that had happened to them it would be more than enough to wake Justin from whatever troubled his dreams.

Like he thought, Justin jerked awake. Blinking rapidly, he went through the same stages Jack did every time he woke now: blind panic, confusion, recognition.

“Are you waiting to see Kellin? I think his parents are long gone, so it’s probably safe to go in now.”

“Oh, uh, yeah. Yeah,” Justin said, a blush spreading across his cheeks. “Must have fallen asleep waiting,” he murmured and sat up. After a few moments, though, it became apparent that Justin had no intentions of getting up any time soon.

Jack sat in a cold, unforgiving hospital chair next to him. He had no idea what sort of thoughts were running through Justin’s mind. He was not an open book, not like Kellin or Nick, and tended to clamp down harder on his emotions than a door to a bomb shelter belonging to a paranoid schizophrenic. Usually, he never could tell if something was bothering the bassist. In the rare moments he could, Jack left the problem alone.  Even if he tried, Justin would never talk to him. There was only one person who could get through Justin’s seemingly impenetrable walls.And that person was ...

Kellin.

But Kellin was otherwise indisposed, perhaps permanently, though he spent every day, every hour hoping not. But one thing was for sure: he couldn’t just leave this problem for someone else to fix, and after everything they’d been through, he knew it would not just go away with time. Like Nick had said, they were in this together. Only they knew what they were going through. He had to step up and help when he could, like he knew they would for him when he needed it.

No one gets left behind, right?

He cast a sideways glance at Justin before staring forward, across the waiting room to the door of the ICU.

“I don’t come here as often as I should,” he said, knowing Justin knew what he meant. “But I’m not brave enough to go in there by myself.”

Justin rested his elbows on his knees, left leg tapping an incessant, irregular beat.

Jack did not know how to push. So instead, he waited.

Justin sprang to his feet, throwing Jack off balance. “Me neither,” he said quickly. “But I owe it to him.” He strode towards the ICU before Jack could ask what he meant.

-

Jack held it together longer than he thought. Normally, he came with Nick, who distracted him from the still figure on the bed with  idle chatter.

But Justin remained completely silent, and Vic looked close to dropping, nodding off every so often, only to jerk awake a few minutes later. The only sound in the room was the mechanical hiss of the ventilator and the steady _beep, beep, beep_ of the heart monitor.

Jack never could handle silence.

It did not surprise him when flashes of blood, and screams, and metal pipes beating down on defenseless bodies invaded his mind. In a rush, he was out the door and down the hall before he even registered that his feet had moved.

Somebody reached for him, grasping his shoulder in a light grip. Jack twisted out of their grasp, grabbed his would be attacker by the lapels of their shirt, and slammed them attacker into the wall. He would not be taken unaware again. He would not …

“Jack,” a familiar voice, softly, calmly said.

He blinked, cleared his eyes, and saw Justin pressed against the wall, completely calm and seemingly unperturbed despite the situation.

“Sorry,” Justin said.

Jack wanted to reply, but his tongue was stuck. Or maybe it was his brain that refused to catch up.

Justin glanced down at the hands fisted in his jacket.

“Sorry,” Jack managed to say, slowly unfurling his stiff hands, wincing at the sharp pain that stabbed his broken arm.

“Don’t,” Justin said and gestured to Jack’s cast with a nod of his head. “Seems like it works after all,” he said with a ghost of a smirk. Justin dusted himself off and walked back towards the ICU. “Come back when you’re ready. But if you aren’t, don’t force yourself. Kellin, more than anyone, would understand.”

It was only after Justin had left him frozen, staring down the now empty hallway, that the words finally registered. Jack looked down at his shaking hands, and curled his fingers, on _both_ hands.

It did, in fact, seem as if they worked. He did not dare to believe, not yet, not until after he talked with his physical therapist.

But if a few tears of relief, instead of pain, fear, hopelessness, slid down his cheeks, no one had to know, but him.

 


End file.
